Tachyon - Fault Tolerant Distributed File System - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/4/17/tachyon-fault-tolerant-distributed-file-system-with-300-time.html?utm_source=feedly <comment><USER2> Anyone know if it has the same single point of failure issues as HDFS (NameNode)?

Also, bummer that it's written in Java. I know that was for easy pluggability into Hadoop, but it makes it tough to write bindings for other languages.

<comment><USER3> Actually, any language with a Thrift binding can talk to Tachyon: [https://github.com/amplab/tachyon/blob/master/src/thrift/tac...](https://github.com/amplab/tachyon/blob/master/src/thrift/tachyon.thrift)

<comment><USER4> I guess using non-native API would introduce significant overhead and kill all the advantages of using this Tachyon filesystem.

I take it, the resulting DFS can't be mounted, am I right? If yes, that's a pity. By the way, are there DFS with similar properties (very fast, aggressive memory use) that can be mounted?

<comment><USER3> Why not? As far as I can tell, it'd be feasible to write a FUSE adapter that uses Thrift to talk to the Tachyon servers.

<comment><USER5> FUSE can be really ugly sometimes though, kernel modules are better if you need any real reliability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Always cool to see different DFS options out there. That said, I personally won't find this very useful. It does not appear to have any POSIX support and thus only would work as a API/library accessible storage share. Hadoop at least has ways of mounting, although I personally haven't used them.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow, so bottom line 1\. useful for Streaming cause of the nature of the file system. 2\. Probably will loose the append nature of HDFS. 3\. Retaining data in memory makes it hard to use with any of the hdfs based databases like hbase. So raw map reducers should definately try it...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am extremely interested in this kind of technology. And to be honest this one sound very interesting. I am trying to night in the lab.</comment>


C optimization: conditional store to avoid dirtying a cache line - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22717010/c-optimization-conditional-store-to-avoid-dirtying-a-cache-line/

<comment><USER2> Years ago I worked on Python optimizations for the string type. I tried speeding up .upper() and .lower() by replacing things like:

            if (isupper(c))
                s[i] = _tolower(c);

with:

            s[i] = _tolower(c);

My mental model, which was still influenced by the microcomputer era, did not match the hardware. Benchmarks quickly identified that my "faster" implementation was actually noticeable slower. That's when I first started to understand cache lines.</comment>


What should you ask the VC? - <AUTHOR> http://babblingvc.typepad.com/pjozefak/2009/05/what-should-you-ask-the-vc.html <comment><USER2> What about the old adage: "Ask for the sale"?</comment>


Show HN: Responsive resume template - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/modestkdr/modern-resume

<comment><USER2> looks good, you might want to look at swipe.js so you can provide a touch optimised version. At its simplest you could use swipe.js so your carousel can be swiped as opposed to clicked when viewing on touch enabled device.

<comment><AUTHOR> The flexslider plugin I used does support swipe feature. Demo : <http://srikanth.me/modern-resume>

<http://www.woothemes.com/flexslider/></comment></comment>


TED: Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

<comment><USER2> If Bill Gates can create another monopoly, but this time offering clean energy for the world, I don't think anyone would complain</comment>


Neutralino.js: build JavaScript-HTML-CSS desktop apps without embedding browsers - <AUTHOR> https://neutralino.js.org/ <comment><USER2> Found a good review about this and how it works here: [https://quick- geek.github.io/articles/438402/index.html](https://quick- geek.github.io/articles/438402/index.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is even better though: [https://www.99xtechnology.com/blog/research/neutralinojs- int...](https://www.99xtechnology.com/blog/research/neutralinojs-internals/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I stop comparing myself to others? - <AUTHOR> I always have this problem of feeling inadequate. I'm a junior CS student at a decent but not great school. Some of my friends go to Stanford or UT Austin and have already interned with multiple top companies, while I haven't accomplished anything of significance. I also read this site daily and I can't even comprehend most of the posts. I didn't figure out what I wanted to do with my life until recently, so now I'm 22 and stuck behind my younger peers.<p>I'm really impatient to achieve big things. It's like I need to in order to justify my existence. How do I transition to a healthier state of mind and stop feeling worthless? <comment><USER4> The multiplicity of casual friendships online has led to an interesting new phenomenon: Because people preferentially broadcast their successes, we tend to get the feeling that everybody else is more successful than ourselves. I don't think you can avoid comparing yourself to others; what you can do is try to keep in mind that life is a mix of good and bad, and even if all you manage to do is avoid the worst of the bad, you're doing pretty well.

Take me for example. I started university when I was 13, won the Putnam competition when I was 18, went on to a doctorate in computing from Oxford University, and single-handedly bootstrapped a successful startup. I think most people here could tell you that much about me; but I doubt many could tell you that I'm 34, that I'm socially awkward and stutter when I'm nervous, that I'm diabetic and wrestle with this life-threatening condition every day, that I'm 20 lbs overweight and due to my sedentary lifestyle have the cardiopulmonary fitness of a typical 50 year old, or that I've been dumped by every woman I've ever dated.

When you inevitably compare yourself to others, remember that there's probably a lot you're not hearing about them.

<comment><USER5> Amazing post, thanks for the openness.

As I get older (I'm still 33), I realize more and more that almost nobody got their stuff together. Most people even in their 40 or 50 are still trying to figure out what to do with their lifes. They change careers, move to a different state, start writing books, start some business different from what they have done their entire life.

When I was young, I always heard that 'life is hard'. I live in a third world country, grew from a poor family and never had much money. But it wasn't until I was married working in a good company that I realized what that means.

I realized that life being hard is not about not having money or a family... these are struggles we all have. Life being hard is all about these choices you have to keep making that are not confortable at all, you can never rest, life is always changing your plans. Even when you think you have it all figured out, this will last only a few years and you will have to start again.

It's all part of life. We all have struggles and the sooner we realize that it's all about the journey and not about the ends, the easier it gets to go on.

<comment><USER6> I'm 34 and I'm also realizing this slowly :) Choices are a major source of my stress. It's the fear that am I making the right choice or will I regret it in the future? I only have one limited life :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, you should start by stopping reading Hacker News, because it's clearly not good for you in your current mental state. I promise, you won't miss anything important.

Next, take some of your time and go volunteer somewhere - go tutor a child or teach someone to read or feed the homeless or whatever else you like, just go help someone out. You're now accomplishing something way more important than interning with some 'top company' somewhere. Congratulations, your existence is now justified.

Finally, now that you're doing something worthwhile for humanity and you're not tormenting yourself by wallowing in everyone's self-promotional bloviating, you can happily focus on learning new things, gradually improving your own skills, and figuring out how to make a big dent in the universe on your own personal schedule, which is different from everybody else's.

Hey, I spent my entire twenties fucking up left and right - whatever you end up doing, I guarantee you're way ahead of me.

<comment><USER8> Consider using this Adblock/uBlock filter:

        news.ycombinator.com##td.subtext

I've been using it for a week or two now. It blocks links to all comments (besides Ask HN, Show HN, etc - which is why I'm here). I've drastically cut down my HN time but still keep up to date on tech news. I also read the articles in full a lot more than I used to.

(It also tidies up the homepage and makes it look a lot cleaner, IMO: [http://i.imgur.com/RzHKD2d.png](http://i.imgur.com/RzHKD2d.png))

<comment><USER9> Contrarywise, I usually just hit the comments without reading the article. It's super fast for bootstrapping yourself into an issue. Does rely on the people on HN not being full of crap, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Welcome to life.

Don't worry though. Everything will be OK.

(The things I'm about to say is/are true for me. So is most of what everyone else here is saying. While it's good that you are asking your peers for help, the answers you will get won't make "sense" until you discover them for yourself. (Like the A-HA moment when you finally grok a mathematics proof or a famous algorithm). This will require effort from you.)

The facts of the matter are simply this:

\- Your life is unique the same way that everyone else's is. \- Your journey is not the same as anybody else's. \- You are a whole person. \- You have all the tools you need. \- :)

The answers you seek are of a spiritual nature and you need some kind of spiritual process to discover them. I can recommend Buddhism, Toaism or even the Yogic disciplines/technologies. What they all have in common is an insistence that one needs to meditate, daily...

(Meditation, loosely, is learning how to accept and acknowledge thoughts that are uncomfortable.)

Good luck!

<comment><USER11> I agree that there is a spiritual growth component here. As another response said, go find someplace to volunteer and help others. Do this doing something you love, even if you think you are not that good at it. For example help code.org, black girls code, FIRST robotics etc.

In terms of HN and how smart people are here: Remember there are a lot of people that participate in HN and the experts and sometimes so called experts come out and respond to the posts in their knowledge domain. So some of these people do know a lot more about a topic than most of us.

I read HN almost daily and don't understand most of the topics and responses. It doesn't bother me at all. If it bothers you you might want to stop for awhile.

I'm 62 and was miserable working at a bank/financial institution. I quit and started working at a university (web services) and volunteering in STEM education of K12 students 9 years ago today. I felt stupid at the bank until I left and realized the people that were above me were clueless. Clueless people promote clueless people. So my biggest advance in my journey started when I was 53 years old.

Now I'm in a much better place. Take care of yourself. Exercise, moderate your vices (if you have them) and give back. Be grateful for what you have and journal that every day until you think in terms of gratitude as your new mental model. And yes meditate and give prayers of thanks for what you have.

You have taken a big step asking for help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So, you're basically normal. Comparing yourself is typical, especially in your early 20's.

Impatience is a great quality, you just need to combine it with Not Giving A Fuck. Comparing yourself slows you down if you go beyond "I should know that too!"

Someone else will always be better than you; embrace it. If you're the smartest person in the room, find a new room. You'll learn more there.

(Not that your friends are "better than you." They fall in a different category called "great family support.")

<comment><USER13> I like this! "If you're the best jazz player in the band, find a new band"

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are many good answers in this Quora thread: [https://www.quora.com/How- can-you-overcome-your-envy-of-peop...](https://www.quora.com/How-can-you- overcome-your-envy-of-people-who-are-your-age-but-are-far-more- successful?share=1)

As many comments on this page suggest, try to stop worrying about what's outside of your control. You can't control if someone else is a better programmer or started coding at a younger age. But you can control what you study, how hard you study, how hard you practice outside of school, etc. If you work hard, 5 years from now there will be a bunch of 27-year-olds that you work with who feel inadequate working next to you.

If something's outside of your control, you _literally_ can't do anything about it. So why make life harder for yourself by worrying? That's like worrying about an asteroid hitting Earth -- you'll upset yourself, but it won't do you any good.

<comment><USER15> Yes, this echoes something Worf once said, "Thinking about what you can't control only wastes energy and creates its own enemy."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The race is long and it is only with yourself.

Realistically, what is the percentage of people in the whole world that can do what you can do? Here is the answer: Under 25-million or you can do what you do better than 0.0000000025% of the planet.

[https://www.quora.com/Approximately-how-many-programmers- are...](https://www.quora.com/Approximately-how-many-programmers-are-there-in- the-world)

I bet that didn't help but look at it this may, you may or may not become a "New York Times, number-one, best selling author" or a "Diva at an Italian opera house" but you can master your craft and use it to better people's lives or even your own life for that matter. Perhaps that should be the goal and revel in those accomplishments?

<comment><USER17> something something suncreen

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Find a goal or even a yardstick that's more meaningful to you than to anyone else. Ideally, also find a path to it that's uniquely appealing to you.

It's way harder to think about what you want than to hop on to society's defaults (schools, work prestige, wealth, looks, ..). [http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html) touches on this ("if you admire two kinds of work equally, [choose the less prestigious]").

When no one else is trying to accomplish the same thing in the same way, only absolute measurements matter: how close did you get? How much did you enjoy the ride?

</comment><comment><USER19> Comparing to others is not the problem.

Focusing on differences is.

The solution is to focus on similarities instead of differences.

By focusing on differences, you will always find something to let you feel inferior, let you stop tackling new things, maybe even saying things to others you do not really mean because you feel down at that moment. By focusing on similarities, you will boost yourself. You will see that others are not that different from you.

When you changed your regular comparison strategy for some time, you might even notice that focusing on differences, in the context of a retrospective is not that bad. It gives you the chance to grow.

<comment><USER20> "The solution is to focus on similarities instead of differences."

Disagree. OP: Focus on what makes you unique. And that probably isn't the obvious stuff. You're in school, surrounded by folks whose talent is that they're good in school. That's not what makes most successful folks successful in life, I can assure you. Or happy.

Maybe you're just natively a generalist and surrounded by folks happy to be specialists. That's great: the world spins because of folks who see the big picture and understand how to connect lessons learned from disparate fields.

How about this: Read Andrew Hargadon's book, "How Breakthroughs Happen"... and then maybe Be That Guy, the one who builds teams and connects networks of experts and puts the whole thing together and makes shit HAPPEN.

School's a terrible place for learning this about yourself, since it's a reproductive mechanism for academics. But today t's pretty instrumental in gaining the necessary credentials and pedigrees. Do your best, but take this as an opportunity to learn about yourself and your broader capabilities.

Onward!

<comment><USER19> There are always multiple ways to tackle a problem. Both ways help. However I do not find it useful to start out with your approach, because it is more complicated, takes more action and is hard to communicate, especially in the context of a single post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here is the simple idea that I always use - "Don't take life too seriously - we are not special". When we start to take our life too seriously we start to think about some sort of objective or some kind of success we want to get to. We start comparing ourselves to others to figure out the so called objective and then we find that we are far behind from everyone else.

Now the way I avoid being too serious about life is by thinking about the Universe and how amazing and large it is. At the scale of the Universe we simply don't matter.

</comment><comment><USER22> Wow, wow, wow! You hit a gold mine of advice with that question... I agree with all these comments. I hope you can see the trend in most of these comments. It's just too easy to say, "Don't compare yourself to others, it's a waste of time!"\- though true... It's easier said than done. I found for me, the moments when I was happiest, balanced & free from all those negative thoughts about myself and where I stood compared to others- is when I focused on me. The best version of yourself has nothing to do with anyone else. I saw a therapist for 2 and a half years. The first year was twice a week. After putting in that much time with figuring out why I felt the way I did about myself, it changed everything. Your emotional intelligence, your soul is not always an easy thing to navigate, but that work is incredibly rewarding. As others have said, you're the only one that can do it. What I'm trying to say most is, begin. May you find a balance in your humanity - be it physical, mentally, & spiritually. And may you find that the compelling question is not how you compare to others or what they may think of you, but rather how you think of yourself. Are you who YOU want to be? If not, begin. You got this ;-) Big things will happen- it's safe to say that they take time.

Oh! and enjoy the ride!! Fuck- Nobody really knows for sure if we get another go at it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Dance.

I'm serious. In dancing your bodily similarities and dissimilarities to your partner are in your face all the time, the fitting of them is (in a way) all there is to dancing. You both have to be aware of it and not fight it, you have to work with it. You have to learn to let the differences flow (so it is not enough to learn the choreography, you need to be able to enjoy the dance).

Words do not make justice to the experience.

2¢

</comment><comment><USER24> What's that quote again, 'while in his 30s Julius Caesar once cried because he felt he hadn't done a tenth of what Alexander the Great had done at the same age'? Don't worry about people being faster than you. Build simple sites/apps (read Pat Flynn's blog rather than HN), see which one sticks, and improve it over time. Don't hope for a massive success, build something simple but useful to a limited audience. That's what I did when I was 22 and that site is about to turn into a business + the skills I learnt got me a freelancing gig which eventually got me hired. It's not an easy path, but it's meaningful. Easy paths such as marrying your high school sweetheart and getting hired at a top company in your 20s do look great, but they aren't making these people any more acquainted with the lengthy process of building great things.

<comment><USER25> "It's a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years." — Tom Lehrer

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Comparing yourself to your peers is the key for personal growth. It's often not easy, in particular in days of Facebook and other social networks but here why I think it's crucial for us:

At the end of the day we are imitating our peers--everyday. When we start as babies we imitate our mother, our siblings and everybody we see. Later in school and university we see what friends and other peers do. Sometimes we think good idea I might try it.

And sometimes we are surprised that in our eyes to us inferior peers try and accomplish stuff which is more challenging, advanced and just more exciting than our life. THIS is the key for personal growth: this feeling that somebody who was inferior all the past overtook us, frustrates us and will lead us into bigger journeys. Especially men who tend to be more competitive cannot stand this feeling and gear up.

I started to raise money because of some 10 year younger guys I met who raised 500k seed with ease. And I found those guys are inferior to me, so I was forced to get on par.

But when I was an office drone deep in corporations I imitated my peers there: worked as little as possible but still climbing the career ladder via office politics, complaining all day how bad the company is, worked just for the weekends (full of partying and girls) and the only goal was planning the next vacation. This was a hollow life where I lacked strong peers and I was slowly degenerating like them for years. I lost time.

This is the good thing about Facebook. Because we have 1,000 of FB friends the probability that we see everyday some big achievement of someone is quite high (and so frustrating) and leads to a very restrictive posting behavior on our side because it tells us: only post if you achieved something special and this initially negative energy might be good: it pushes into new and more challenging activities.

I know not everybody will like my answer but again peers who push us out of our comfort zone help our personal development. So we should see it as something positive.

</comment><comment><USER27> Realize that what you can achieve in your life depends on the DNA you started with, the life circumstances that got you to where you are today, your world view, perspective and perception, and a healthy dose of luck.

Then realize that there are zero other people in the world who have that same set of attributes. Therefore, no matter who you interact with, see on YouTube, or read about, the difference between the two of you is not going to be explained by something you can control.

[https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/communication- success/2...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/communication- success/201409/how-stop-comparing-yourself-others-and-feel-happier)

</comment><comment><USER28> I started learning programming at 27, I'm 30 now, have a full time job and never been happier, so you are definitely not late.

The turning point for me was when I read this article: [http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make- yo...](http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-you-better- person/)

It basically says you have to make things and you won't feel yourself worthless.

Start learning and doing hard, that's all!

</comment><comment><USER29> Listen to these for starters: [http://www.bornhappy.co/michaelneill/](http://www.bornhappy.co/michaelneill/) and [http://www.bornhappy.co/love/](http://www.bornhappy.co/love/), possibly this TED talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr6VawX2nr4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr6VawX2nr4)

</comment><comment><USER30> A recent article in the Economist explains why comparing to others makes us unhappy. In short, we keep comparing ourselves to people who are better off: [http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and- economics/21677223...](http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and- economics/21677223-new-study-shows-money-can-buy-you-happinessbut-only- fleetingly-others)

That said, I think there are concrete things you could do to improve your current situation. First, it sounds like you now know what to do. That's excellent! At 22, you are not far behind at all.

Early in grad school, things weren't going well and I felt like I was falling behind my peers. I ended up finding a lot of comfort knowing there was a CS professor in my department who had trained as a doctor but then decided his passion was in CS. He basically had to start over in school. To know that one could get a later start and still achieve success was incredibly reassuring.

That said, I think you might also benefit from having a mentor. I have found it useful to have someone experienced and successful from which to learn and model myself after. They have given me the confidence to go and tackle larger problems and helped me move forward when things are looking pretty bleak.

</comment><comment><USER31> HN used to be much more technical and practical. Now you have much more posts about history, biology, astronomy, many thing that are very very far from being (practical) CS. I can only assume that HN readers want to feel even more sophisticated with far fetched intellectual topics. I think HN will make most persons feel miserable just like social networks do, on facebook others have more friends on HN others are smarter than you.

You should stop reading HN. I've been contemplating this for myself for some time. I have to look around more, but so far I see reddits programming subreddit is more condensed and superior if you just want to keep track on programming news.

For your current situation I can tell you that everything is fine. I've got into programming as an autodidact later than you with zero experience and my school career was average at best. Just take your time and go really deep into a single programming language, exercise with meaningless projects, use stack overflow or friendly forums to discuss problems. Just don't compare to others, there are always smarter people than you. But if you train the practical parts really hard it becomes meaningless because the results are the same.

Also if you want to learn something about humbleness, read Herman Hesse's Siddartha, just don't dive into esoterics afterwards.

Good Luck.

[edit] Nice article about depression and social media: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2015/04/08/new- stud...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2015/04/08/new-study-links- facebook-to-depression-but-now-we-actually-understand-why/)

</comment><comment><USER32> I am not being cynical, but I wouldn't recommend using HN to replace a therapist.

<comment><USER33> This is good advice.

The therapist at my university was really useful to several people I know, plus myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> 1\. The people you look up to also look up to someone. There's always someone better, you will never be satisfied if you use other people as a benchmark. Set your own goals, live up to your own standards.

2\. What one person can do, another can do too. It might take years of practice or study, but all you need to accomplish things is a little luck and a lot of perseverance. Being really good at something is a lifelong pursuit. Better find something to do where you'll enjoy the journey, because there is no meaningful destination.

3\. Action causes reaction. As long as you're doing something to move ahead opportunities will happen, even if you can't yet see how, in turn accelerating you and causing more opportunities. Achievement snowballs. The hardest million is the first.

4\. It's easier to adjust your perception of things than the way things really are. If you are not happy, becoming so is less a factor of changing your life than changing your attitude. Meditation helps.

5\. It's OK to say none of that is relevant. Everyone has their own path. Mine is not yours. My advice only truly pertains to my own younger self.

</comment><comment><USER35> Do things you are interested in, and that you can commit yourself to spending time on consistently. Dropping things you've started without making the conscious decision to do so will foster a sense of underachievement. Accept that Rome wasn't built in a day and start small. Build yourself up gradually. Use your small successes to build momentum. Accept that you cannot change the past, instead try to guide the future. Invest the time in doing a personal development plan. Even if you don't use it, the simple act of doing it will help to give you some direction and make you appreciate what it is you really want. You can then set about making steps in that direction. Be wary of sacrifices you choose to make, particularly concerning people. Choosing to learn language X instead of language Y is easy to solve when you change your mind, but convincing the person you love to take you back after you chose your career over them is likely to be much much harder.

</comment><comment><USER11> OP here are some references that may help you. The first is to assess your stengths and find a career that supports your stengths. Then work on making your stengths stonger. Think about a good baseball batter. Improving their batting average 20% makes them a great batter.

I have used SF in my own life,, with the teams I have managed and with some life coaching customers. If you want to know better how to use it send me an email eric [at] ericfplamer [dot] com

These two ted videos are also useful for 1) thinking differntly about happiness and 2) thinking differently about genius.

[http://www.ted.com/talks/martin_seligman_on_the_state_of_psy...](http://www.ted.com/talks/martin_seligman_on_the_state_of_psychology)

[http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius](http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius)

</comment><comment><USER36> I strongly recommend that you read some Epicurus, Epictetus and Seneca ;) Start with Senecas "On the Happy Life"

<comment><USER15> Phenomenal, and highfive to you, my friend. This is I think some of the best advice in here. I also draw a lot from Marcus Aurelius. The main body of literature of his (Meditations) was actually his personal journal. It is highly likely that he never intended on having those works published. There is really something profound in the stoic way of life that transcends time and stabs at the heart of humanity. What great advice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> (For context: I started writing this as a reply to gyardley's comment[1], but I thought it might be more appropriate as a direct response to the OP instead.)

I just wanted to add that you don't necessarily have to make a big dent in the universe to feel fulfilled. I think that making a meaningful positive impact on a small number of people you care about (or even _one_ person) can be just as rewarding—if not more so—than making a difference in the lives of thousands. I certainly admire and encourage your ambition to achieve big things, but "smallish dents" are great too.

To address another point, I think it's great that you know what you want to do with your life. I definitely don't believe that 22 is "too late", however. I'm 28, and it feels like I've made that decision dozens of times in the last 15 years or so. Whether you're still in college or decades past it, "what you want to do with your life" is not a static thing that you just discover one day. It's something that you can spend your life constantly rediscovering, and I hope that you do so. Right now, for you it's computer science, but who knows where your passions and proclivities might lead you in a few years. It might be somewhere else in tech, or it might not, and in both cases, _that 's okay_. In fact, it might be somewhere you never imagined yourself going, and—at the risk of overusing this word—that's great too.

Finally, if you do decide to "quit" HN or just take a break from it (both good options), read some of these[2] before you go (especially the ones down below the rather tangential discussion about travel costs).

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10523845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10523845)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9393213](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9393213)

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't think you can stop comparing yourself to others, and you shouldn't try to. It's a good thing to do.

What you should try to do is realize you are you, and you have the opportunity every second to be creative and additive rather than competitive or detrimental to the world. That is amazingly valuable :)

<comment><USER39> > "It's a good thing to do."

Can you explain why?

<comment><USER38> I guess what I really mean is that I think it is good to critically and emotionally analyze others' lives ... try to understand what's led them to where they are and how they feel.

I've had to work hard at this, and maybe it takes a fundamental belief in the value of everyone, but whenever I find something positive in others, it doesn't make me feel upset or stressed... I'm just inspired and want to learn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Life can't be defined by arriving at a place and feeling that you've "made it" or "gotten ahead." If you actually do "make it" by accident, the next thing that happens is that you die - in spirit, if not in body. A lot of people who suddenly get rich or famous meltdown, because they still don't know what to do. And a lot of people who go all-in on their careers burn out. There are opportunities that you can miss and regret, but you aren't an abstract person or a movie action hero - you won't be "on" all the time.

Instead, focus on the everyday cycle. How do you want to construct your life so that you are living well each day, each week? Take whatever things you're already good at - and can do without much effort if you just start, and concentrate - and put more of your chips behind those. It's in the regular practice that you become really "great", and there is no book or curriculum that can tell you how to practice at that level of motivation. It might lead you away from core CS, but that's okay. There are a lot of kinds of gigs out there, and you might overlook a possibility and come back to it later, so you aren't necessarily harming your future at this stage. Stay in good health and keep your stress down and you will get there eventually.

There are all sorts of little things that I'm sure other people figured out long before I did, and then things that I learned that they will never learn in their lives. If you value learning a lot, you end up not valuing wealth and status as much, because it doesn't have much to teach you. And then it doesn't matter that you didn't intern at a top company, because suddenly your friends are all a bunch of weirdos too.

I only recently realized that technical writing was a thing I might want to do, and I'm 30. I also only recently realized how to stop overtraining with weights and make more substantial progress, and this was after some 15 years of off-and-on practice with lifting. (It's simple: two-day split once a week instead of once every 2-4 days.)

</comment><comment><USER41> A study shows people of age 18-25 are the most stressed out, as it a period of "entering adulthood". This is the time you have to make many important decisions in life and it is absolutely normal to get confused and remember you are not alone in facing such a situation . Millions of people of the age 18-25 face the same problem. But what you must do is, sit and think what you really want in life and listen to your inner voice. Always remember no two fingers are the same, so never compare yourself with anybody else. Each one is made for a purpose. Identify yours and work towards it.You may not realize your own strength untill you set a goal and work towards it. So all the best my dear friend. Be cheerful. You are not alone!

</comment><comment><USER42> _It 's like I need to in order to justify my existence._

According to the Christian bible, god invented humans because he was lonely. Based on that, I figure I am entertainment for a cosmic intelligence beyond my comprehension. I am probably more entertaining when I am fucking up, so I figure I cannot get this wrong.

You don't need to justify your existence.

Next, I suggest you read some bios of people who had success later in life. Twenty-two is really not that old.

Also, try either unplugging from listening to the bragfests of all your so- called friends or scratch the surface and look deeper. A lot of people who rub their success in the faces of people around them are incredibly unhappy you couldn't pay me enough to trade lives with them (assuming a genie could grant such a wish).

</comment><comment><USER43> I would liken the whole process of 'success' as nothing more than the acquisition of accolades. If you peek beyond the veil of most institutions (financial or otherwise), there is the fabled trophy you must acquire at the end. This trophy can be anything, and the institutions are always careful to suppose "It's not about the trophy", but secretly it is.

Money is a trophy. Marriage is a trophy. Dissolve the trophy and focus on what you need instead of what you want. Most of what a person needs is fairly rudimentary and easy to attain. Be careful with validation (a basic need) because it's usually sought in the most egregious places

</comment><comment><USER44> The short answer is to let go.

It can take years of training and searching to let go, the best guide I have found is this book : [http://zenhabits.net/lg/](http://zenhabits.net/lg/)

</comment><comment><USER45> Compare yourself with your own self, but several years younger. Have you achieved something notable? Did you just now noticed that you did something wrong before? Then you're all right - you're growing.

</comment><comment><USER46> Find a way to get some confidence. Learn something new. I'm reading / listening to "Quantum memory power" by Dominic O'Brien right now. There are some fun tricks in there that make memorizing things trivial. He points out this builds confidence, though I just think it's fun. After that... Take it day by day, and take it easy on yourself

</comment><comment><USER47> Unhappiness and feeling inadequate is correlated with not doing what your gut tells you to do and living somebody's else life.

</comment><comment><USER48> My life began at 40, amusingly.

6 billion people in the world.

</comment><comment><USER49> > I didn't figure out what I wanted to do with my life until recently

Great, just do whatever that is. You're not behind, 22 is basically 0 years old in your career. Just start doing the thing you want to do until you become really good at it.

</comment><comment><USER50> Stop minimizing things you have accomplished. You think everyone started off at the top. Look at each project or task you completed as a stepping stone to the next and to become better..

Simply put.. Don't try to copy the Jones's.

</comment><comment><USER51> Not comparing yourself is one thing, but you should also question your values and goals. If you think interning at top companies is a good thing, you could try to also intern at a top company. Just one example.

</comment><comment><USER52> I am 32 and facing the same issue at work and life in general. Comparing to others comes to me naturally, and it has been a reason of lot of anxiety to me. I am yet to figure out a permanent solution.

</comment><comment><USER53> No one has it all together. Ever. Full stop. So quit worrying. Do -> measure -> adjust -> repeat. Most people don't peak professionally until they're in their 40's.

</comment><comment><USER54> For most people, the answer is simple: stop being in your 20s.

</comment><comment><USER55> Meditate and tell yourself that you're pretty okay.

</comment><comment><USER56> By my estimation about 6,000,000,000 people would be very happy to trade places with you. Compared to them you are doing just fine.

</comment><comment><USER57> "I'm really impatient to achieve big things. It's like I need to in order to justify my existence. "

First, you are a human being, whose worth is not tied to how much money you have, how fancy CV you have or how high grades you have. You are valuable and precious just as you are. You might be a bit lost, and that's ok, most of us are at one time or another.

I'm writing this as a person who felt maybe just as bad as you did at your age.

I don't want to hurt your feelings but "Achieving big things" is not a life goal. It's a posthumous statement in an obituary. And a lot of people who are described as achieving big things actually felt they failed miserably.

Take, for instance Ghandi - he had pretty radical goals in terms of India and he felt he failed most of them. His tactic of non-violence and a fantastically successful publicity campaign of personality cult got him in to the history books for good but as for the goals he drove - a perpetually rural, united india - did not really happen (and I think it was a good thing too). And most of the hype around him was due to other people choosing to idolize him - <USER2> him, himself, doing a shitload of extravagant extraordinary work.

Your friends, by the way? Their fancy internships? You are just trapped in an association loop when idolizing them. You attach a positive value to the brands of the corporations, and by your friends interning there this association leaks to them. Then you recognize you do not have this direct associative link, and feel bad about it. Although - it's all just happening in your mind. You are jealous of their life story. But please recognize - <USER3> giants of world history have had mostly pretty shitty and ordinary lives, and are remembered mostly due to a stroke of luck, or, due to a fact that they tenaciously drove towards their _own personal goal_ that for some historical fluke happened to be in synchronicity with the current world events.

Now, how fantastic are your friends actually? Maybe some of them got better grades - so what.

It does not mean they are better than you. It's just that they score higher on a specific arbitrary metric due to their life circumstances and history at this point in time. Arbitrary - because let's face it, large systems are not fair, nor are they designed to be. The system of education, the system of economy, the system of government - they are all fabrications with emergent properties no one can really control exactly.

We are all corks ebbing in the ocean of life. Sometimes the current takes us forward, sometimes not. The thing is, you cannot choose who you are, but, you can daily choose what you do.

"How do I transition to a healthier state of mind and stop feeling worthless?"

I think you might need therapist or meditation for that.

As a self help book I can heartily recommend "The science of happiness" by Rick Hanson. ([http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DVW8VN2?keywords=science...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DVW8VN2?keywords=science%20of%20happiness&qid=1446892025&ref_=sr_1_2&s=digital- text&sr=1-2))

Personally, for me, professionally - I needed to find something that I found was intrinsically motivating. Luckily I did, in computational physics and computer graphics and this gave me intrinsic motivation to play around with things and find stuff out. I'm not hugely successful but I have a good career and feed my family. I would not have had half a good career unless I had found something compelling. I do hope you find something that interests you!

The difference with external and internal motivators is that while both compel you to action, fulfilling external motivators usually suck you energy while internal ones give it to you.

I found Richard Feynmans* self autobiographical writings assuring. While they are an attempt at self-aggrandization at painting an image of "the cleverest person in the room" they also discuss deeply personal matters of death, loss, de-motivation and ways to cope with it. When Feynman felt down, he tried to find something he could find interest in playing with - no matter how silly or trivial. I've followed this same protocol throughout my life and found it a good course when things look bleak. Play!

*"What Do You Care What Other People Think?" and "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" by Richard Feynman.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm going to offer up what might be a bit different advice. Comparing yourself to others isn't necessarily a bad thing. Doing this can tell you who can help you improve, or maybe you identify role models, appreciate a good mentor, etc... Or it can show you who you might be able to help. Sometimes we all need some help.

The real battle is in how you define your sense of worth. Take smarts, for example. In your life, you are going to encounter people smarter than you are, as well as not as smart, or maybe you can't really tell. What does that really mean?

Think about being smart enough. One artifact of that thought could be what you accomplish boils down to how willing you are to do the work to actually accomplish it. Being willing is very high value! Suddenly, how smart you are isn't a defining attribute. Your intent and resolve are.

Another artifact of that might be the realization that smart people "rub off" If you want to improve, being around people better than you is an excellent way to do that, and feeling inadequate gets in the way of all that too. Think back on that intent and resolve and maybe you realize everyone who wants to do stuff with their life has those things and is sharing them with others who appreciate it. Going further, many people respond favorably to someone they see doing the work to get after those big things, whatever they are. And there should be no shame in any of that at all.

Extend that a bit more, and suddenly those comparisons have value! Hard working people rub off. Social people rub off. Etc...

What you need to do is absorb unabashedly. As you encounter others who are compelling in some way, watch and learn! Make a few friends. Those people know it's OK to be who they are, as should you. Those people are doing the work, making the friends, showing good intent. As should you.

Do the work and trust in yourself. Get help when you need it. Give help when others need it. Treat yourself with the same respect you would others you admire or believe you can learn from.

In fact, cultivate a sense of respect. Mutual respect. When you demonstrate this, people most often return it. And if it's your intent to do that, work hard, get something you believe in done, people will most often return that too, and in that process you become one of those people you are comparing yourself to.

Give with honest, good intent, and 'ye shall receive.

You aren't stuck behind anybody. You are where you are, and it's up to you to move forward and do what you want with your life. What you are doing here is looking at younger peers who made different choices and you are wishing you had made those same choices. Or you are buying the bullshit they are selling.

A great many people never, ever really figure out what they want to do with their life. Often, they are too busy living it, having fun, building, doing, playing to think about it. Others are driven, focused, intent.

So you've arrived at some life goal! Good for you. Now quit your regrets and start getting after it, whatever it is. There will always be others who seem better positioned, or whatever. It's not about any of that. There are people who are worse off, or more poorly positioned too.

Do you want to be here? Do you care about other people, the world, and the things you find in it? Great! That's all anyone requires as justification to be here. No joke. Be sure and share that often. People like other people who care. People value others who care too.

Share that thing you want to do with others, and ask them what it is they are wanting to do as well. Maybe you can help, or maybe it's good to just listen and appreciate they are doing something they care about. Maybe you have a common goal.

Maybe you can realize that's all any of us are doing, you included.

Like I said, give and 'ye shall receive.

One great way to feel better about yourself is to help others, and the doing of that does wonders for your own sense of worth. Do it. Clear that mess out of your head and free yourself to get after it, whatever it is. And all those people you helped are very highly likely to appreciate it and return the favor too.

</comment><comment><USER59> The real question, I would guess, is where you get your sense of self-worth? It is worthwhile to do a bit of introspection to understand what really matters to you as opposed to what all the people around you tell you should matter to you. A while back, I found that a lot of my motivations to achieve certain things where driven by pride and a need to show off to my peer group and not due to any real intrinsic desire for those things so I started asking myself why I was working so hard for things that I do not really care so much about. The question I kept asking my self was "What is your life worth?" If at any moment I was told my life was going to be over, what are the things I would wish I had accomplished. The list I came up with (and it is a pretty short list) are the things I use to prioritize my actions. I am always checking back to that list to be sure I am actually trying to accomplish those things.

One caveat about setting any goals that involve the approval of or comparison to other people (e.g. I want to be as wealthy/successful/beautiful/smart/talented as person X or I want to be famous and celebrated) is that there is always someone better, more successful, prettier, smarter or whatever-er you desire and so chasing these dreams are a mirage. I remember reading an article in Forbes (or Fortune, I forget which) which described what life is like for various stages of wealth. The descriptions of life for people who are worth seven figures then eight were pretty much what you would think but I will always remember the first words used to describe people who have a net worth in the low hundred millions: "Prepare to have your ego crushed". I remember thinking that's ridiculous, if I ever have a hundred million dollars, there is no way that I would feel insecure about my status and then I realized that I know a lot of fairly wealthy people (in the seven to eight figure range) who are very, very insecure about their wealth and in fact feel like failures simply because they are comparing themselves to others. The only way to win this game is not to play.

Also, do realize that we are all very influenced by peer pressure. Why do you think there are red states and blue states? You think somehow every one in a particular geography just decided to have a certain set of opinions? Nope, my guess is 80% of our opinions are driven by the opinions of the other people around us. So the practical way to make this work for you is to find people who have the values you want and hang out with them. Also, limit your interactions with people who move you in the other direction. If's tough but for a decision as important as this, you should try to actively shape your life rather than have it just happen to you.

Lastly, you should always separate your happiness from your achievement of your goals. You should be happy and fulfilled regardless of the outcome of your strivings. Your goals, however wonderful, are just one aspect of your life and not the whole point.

</comment><comment><USER60> How can you possibly be impatient to achieve big things when you don't understand what you want to do and what HN posts are about?

You need to understand that you won't achieve big things. You're not Zuckerberg and you're not Steve Jobs. You're not going to be a billionaire, or even a millionaire. It's pretty evident from the things that you wrote above.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, you can accomplish great things once you gained the maturity to realize that you need to work hard and study hard and learn. Figure out what you enjoy, and work hard at it. You might not be the next Steve Jobs (no one is), but you can make a very good living in tech if you work hard and keep learning throughout your career.</comment>


Zuckerberg to sell Facebook shares worth about $2.3 billion - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/101285179 <comment><USER2> According to Business Insider ~$1b USD will go to three charities: Zuckerberg's foundation, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and The Breakthrough Prize In Life Science.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-just- gave-990...](http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-just- gave-990-million-to-charity-2013-12)</comment>


Step by Step Guide to Mobile App Development Cost - <AUTHOR> https://idapgroup.com/blog/how-much-cost-develop-custom-app/ <comment><USER2> I like your post, it is very useful for beginners in app dev</comment>


When Goodharting Is Optimal - <AUTHOR> https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/megKzKKsoecdYqwb7 <comment><USER2> This is just a demonstration of how naively optimizing the expected value is not actually "optimal" in general.

There are two fundamental strategies for the robot. One is to stay on L forever, and have a 50.1% chance of receiving... let's call it `x` amount of reward, and a 49.9% chance of receiving nothing. The other is to move back and forth (L, center, R, center), which has a 100% chance of receiving `x/4` reward. (In theory the robot could also stay on R forever, but that's strictly inferior to staying on L, even if only slightly.)

The robot can also use a mix of these two strategies, e.g. by moving back and forth but waiting an extra turn every time it's on L. This increases the worst-case reward at the cost of reducing the best-case reward.

Let's rephrase in gambling terms. Suppose you have a one-time offer to bet any amount of money and then flip a fair coin (well, a 50.1/49.9% coin). If it's heads, the money you bet is quadrupled; if it's tails, you lose the money. Then the first option above represents betting all your money; the second option represents betting nothing; mixing the strategies is equivalent to betting only some of your money.

What would you do? The expected value of the money you come away with is 2x the money you bet, so if you're optimizing for expected value, you'll bet all the money you own. But most people wouldn't, because the risk of coming away with nothing is not worth the possible benefit. Personally, I might bet some of my money, but there's a good chance I'd bet nothing, because I care much more about the worst-case scenario than the average scenario – at least when the chance of a worst-case scenario is so high (almost 50%!).

You could argue that monetary gain is not the same thing as a reward function, and risk aversion should be modeled as part of the reward calculation, so that you can, in fact, optimize the expected value of the reward function. But in that case, the robot just has a bad (or non-human-like) reward function, so it's no surprise that it makes strange decisions.

</comment><comment><USER3> This really feels like an article that is trying to say something important about a bigger issue. But the examples and the overall tone really diminish it. They allude a lot to things more important than them like Goodhart's law, mainly for cache, while they talk about their own poor quality idea(a bizarre imagined scenario far removed from, at least my, regular concerns). In the case of an AI show a concrete example involving a robot vacuum. Otherwise it feels like one of my junior's blowing smoke up my ass about hardware threads.

</comment><comment><USER4> >UL and UR think that that policy is optimal!

Whatever UL and UR are they're introduced as "reward functions". They "see", they "prefer", they "think" etc. Is it normal to anthropomorphize reward functions now?

I find it makes this article hard to read. Is this common in robotics and if so, why would you describe reward functions in such a roundabout way?</comment>


Are Flat-Earthers Being Serious? - <AUTHOR> http://www.livescience.com/24310-flat-earth-belief.html <comment><USER2> I've been perversely interested in this Flat Earth movement for a few months. There are a lot of long, stunningly stupid, vehemently argued YouTube videos out there from flat earthers. There are a couple of basic science-minded people who take them on, often with some pretty entertaining results. But one thing is clear is that the flat earthers simply aren't listening. It goes a lot deeper than misunderstandings of facts or what they see when they walk outside. It's really hard to explain such weaponized ignorance. They aren't asking questions, they don't want to know, they just want to tear down the establishment (by exposing secret inside knowledge) in whatever way they can. It's psychological and goes much deeper than beliefs.

<comment><USER3> It's not just flat-Earthers. I suspect this is reflective of some broader psychological phenomenon- what the article calls "conspiracy-theory psychology", but I don't think that quite covers it. I recently came across someone who was just as religiously convinced that JavaScript was not Turing- complete. No amount of mathematical argument could convince him otherwise. He didn't claim any conspiracy, just had an utter refusal to consider any evidence. It was surreal.

<comment><USER4> This is an interesting topic on it's own. I think it has to do with the hyper- connectivity that our modern digital world provides that allows us to self- segregate and form self-supporting echo chambers for just about anything we want to believe. So while the psychological underpinnings for people preferring their beliefs over objective truth is just human nature, I think the _potency_ of modern day conspiracy-theory thinking is because we really can form an entire world ourselves, (print/visual media, online communities, higher ed) that supports our own thinking and it gets further embedded.

<comment><USER5> Well, the association on the article was founded at the XIX century.

I don't think it's our modern hyper-connected world.

<comment><USER4> I wasn't focusing on the genesis of these ideas, which frankly have always been around in every technological era, I was talking about how such ideas can persist in the age of limitless information, education, and technology. And my answer was as stated above. The curious thing is that as information and access to information has increased, the "intrenchedness" of some of these fringe ideas has increased as well; like an opposite and equal effect. I would have expected the opposite. So I'd say that hyper-connectivity has made community ties stronger for believers in order to survive the information onslaught. Nothing binds a small community more then direct opposition from, well, everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find these people particularly interesting, not because of the absurdity of their belief, but because of the _certainty_ they have in their belief and how difficult it is to convince them otherwise.

The article points out that "many Americans" hold some kind of wacky belief and strongly resist attempts to challenge it: vaccines cause autism, global warming isn't real, the moon landing was faked, the earth is 6,000 years old, dinosaurs drowned in the Great Flood, ghosts are real, etc...

So rather than the Flat Earthers being anomalies, I actually think they represent the general public quite well; it's just that their crazy belief is different from mine or yours.

What I am really curious about is: what would it take to successfully convince one of these people that they are wrong? Because if you solve this problem, then you solve the problem in its generality, and you can apply the technique to the vast number of people who still believe the earth was _literally_ created in 7 days.

My best guess? Ask them, "What would it take to convince you otherwise?" The problem isn't that most people are incapable of learning the truth — it's that they don't _want_ to learn the truth. Take for instance someone who believes dinosaur bones were planted in the earth by the devil. I have a hard time imagining that if you handheld them and took them step-by-step through the scientific method (e.g., starting with archaeological sites), that by the end of a year's worth of research, they would still disagree with the mainstream scientific view.

And that's the cool thing about science: you don't have to take anyone's word for it! You can check what people are saying all by yourself. Go out there with ice core machines, thermometers, and satellites, and trace through the same steps that the climate experts have taken. After years of following their own work for yourself, there's no way you _couldn 't_ believe in global warming.

I think what it really comes down to is that most people would rather live with a comforting or reassuring lie than an uncomfortable truth, and even given the opportunity and resources for discovering the truth themselves, they would prefer not to.

<comment><USER7> The big thing is you can't convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced. They have already made up their mind, dug in their heels, and are willing to fight to the death.

In some cases they would consider themselves a bad person if they didn't defend their ideals to the death. This is especially true if there is a religious aspect to their view. They don't call it a "reasoned position" on religion, it is belief. Belief is strongest when you keep it despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is a core tenet of Christianity and I suspect most other religions as well. Your faith will be tested by "deceivers" constantly and you must keep it.

It's impossible to use logic or science to convince someone of something when they think logic and science are tools of the devil.

It's also the Amiga effect. When a community grows smaller the remaining members are the most ardent. Once you are down to just a handful of remaining members all that is left are the die hard fanboys. All of the reasonable people left a long time ago.

<comment><USER8> "Belief is strongest when you keep it despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is a core tenet of Christianity and I suspect most other religions as well."

Huh? This isn't true at all.

<comment><USER9> "Core tenet" overstates the case a bit, but _credo quia absurdum_ has a long history in Christian apologetics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The explanation is a lot more simple I think.

Back in the old days, the way you showed you were better than everyone else was owning the nicest car, having air conditioning, or having a powered mower.

Now that more or less everyone has more or less everything, the only ways we can fulfill the basic instinct to be better than our neighbors is engaging in these kind of "all the sheep think this happened, but really..." ideas. Psuedo-intellectualism at it's finest.

You could show these people facts all day, it doesn't matter. Hell if you took one of them up in one of those Space Jets they'd probably swear you were faking it somehow, because the longer you hold onto a belief, the more invested in it you are, the more it's going to wound your ego to admit you're wrong. Most people would rather take a bullet than admit they were wrong (especially Americans and Brits) so that's how we end up with the Flat Earth people.

<comment><USER11> I think you're onto something. Most people I know who want to appear smart find it necessary to be contrarian. Most of what they say is can be rephrased as "ordinary people just believe everything they're taught, but I've learned how to think so (9/11, illuminati, global warming, anti-vaccine, and so on but only one madness)".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have always suspected that the Flat Earth society was a put-on - a joke. There is a certain very British kind of humor where you assume some absurd position and stick to it with a straight face no matter what - you never crack a smile or break character. The pet store owner in the Monty Python parrot routine is a good example.

I recall when I was a kid, a Flat Earth guy was interviewed on TV after John Glenn's orbital flight. The interviewer pointed out that Glenn could see the round earth out his window and he could see he was passing over the entire circumference of the Earth every ninety minutes and ground stations around the world could track him coming over the horizon and passing overhead and ... etc. etc. The flat earth guy earnestly explained that Glenn was just circling around the edge - the perimeter - of the flat Earth, don't you see? - all the while making circular hand motions around the edge of the the flat table top where he was seated. I figured even then that the flat earth guy was just putting on the interviewer, daring him to say what he was no doubt thinking: "Oh for pity's sake, come off it". But both of them played along, neither of them let on that he thought the whole interview was just a joke.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've been getting a kick out of the flat Earth thing. I've figured it as a "guerrilla ontology" or "alternate reality" prank in the tradition of Robert Anton Wilson, the Church of the Subgenus, the Incunabula Papers, etc. Either that or it's a skeptic troll of the "alt media" community.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why don't they all just get together and walk over to the edge of the planet and see if there is a cliff or not. Seems like a really easy "theory" to prove. A coupe hundred people walking together while live blogging there attempt to the world should be save from secret NASA police.

<comment><USER15> Why bother? why would they want to prove themselves wrong?

Why don't you keep walking in one direction then tap them on the back when you've gone the whole way to prove tou're right?

When you argue against people who have no interest in evidence, it's really very tricky

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am trying to think of a way to prove without a doubt that the earth is not flat. I thought about sending them into space, and having them look through a window at the round earth suspended in the black. But then I almost know what they would say; the window is somehow distorting the true appearance of the earth. If it doesn't conform to their view, they will create reasons as to why. There are so many similar examples of people rejecting new information/evidence within our world now.

<comment><USER17> Measure your shadow at solar noon, fly south and measure your shadow at solar noon there. (Solar noon may differ from 1200.)

Essentially, just repeat this ancient experiment: [http://www.juliantrubin.com/bigten/eratosthenes.html](http://www.juliantrubin.com/bigten/eratosthenes.html)

<comment><USER18> That only works if the people you are trying to convince believe that the Sun is far enough away for its rays to be essentially parallel at the two measuring locations.

Do flat Earth believers believe in a sufficiently large solar system for that to be true?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is this not easy to prove its false? Just take a flight from the southern tip of Chile to South Australia. If the earth is indeed flat, the flight would take 24+ hours. But since they would fly over Antarctica, it only takes ~10.

I suppose one explanation could be that the 747 flight they are in somehow gained the ability to go faster than a F16 at maximum thrust.

<comment><USER20> FTA:

> [The theory is that] "GPS devices are rigged to make airplane pilots think > they are flying in straight lines around a sphere when they are actually > flying in circles above a disc."

<comment><USER19> my reply has to do with the unexpected time difference, not the GPS. When a flight (according to the flat earth) should take 24 hours and only takes 12.

<comment><USER21> A circle is longer than a straight line, so it would explain the time difference too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you fancy a trip down this particular rabbit hole:

[http://www.atlanteanconspiracy.com/2015/03/flat-earth- societ...](http://www.atlanteanconspiracy.com/2015/03/flat-earth-society- controlled-op.html)

[http://www.atlanteanconspiracy.com/search/label/Controlled%2...](http://www.atlanteanconspiracy.com/search/label/Controlled%20Opposition)

[https://www.youtube.com/user/ericdubay77/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/ericdubay77/videos)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5i_iDyUTCg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5i_iDyUTCg)

</comment><comment><USER23> It's interesting to me that they use language superficially similar to the language of rationality and science to justify their beliefs. The belief is ridiculous, but how many people have opinions that they rationalize as scientific that aren't so ridiculous but still unjustified? It's easier to convince yourself that you're 'rational' than it is to be 'rational'.

<comment><USER24> The entire field of "alternative medicine" is just like this: scientific- sounding, rationalized as scientific, but in reality not at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The absurdity of this intrigued me and I dropped by their site. Read a few threads and it seems like they're not fond of satellite photography and rely on their senses almost exclusively. So here's a little question for them: why does a ship seem to "sink" into the ocean the further it gets?

<comment><USER11> It practice ships disappear into optical obscurity before you can see that only the top half is visible. And even that could just be a big wave, right?

<comment><USER25> Not really. A big enough ship combined with a clear day and a set of binoculars works pretty well. As for the big wave, repeat the experiment enough times to filter out the noise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I love that there's a Flat Earth Society of Australia and I wonder whether they think they're on top or below the disk.

In short, we have a crisis of epistemology in our culture, and facts (empirical, repeatable, independent measurements) don't win arguments any more.

<comment><USER24> Yes, and that's why western (or at least American) civilization is likely doomed to being eclipsed by the Chinese before too long. Irrationality like that just isn't compatible with being a leading, technological society.

<comment><USER27> What makes you think the Chinese aren't equally irrational?

<comment><USER24> Because I don't see a Creationism Museum or a bunch of megachurches over there, or a bunch of loony conspiracy theorists, flat-earthers, moon-landing- deniers, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've always said there are people who are so set in their wrong beliefs about something that if they believed the sun rose in the west you could point them east in the morning and they would still persist in ignoring the reality.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra Their model is surprisingly waterproof for tinfoil hatters. Genuinely elegant.

<comment><USER5> I just loved how, instead of simply rejecting gravitation (why would they need it?) they rationalized an incredibly more contrived explanation out of General Relativity.

I'm still not convinced they are serious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I find Flat-Earthers belief as surprising as an educated person believing in God.

<comment><USER30> -1 for steering this towards a religious debate.

I'm not religious and don't believe in a god, but who's to say there isn't a god? We still don't have an explanation for how we're here. Until then, I'd say it's as fair a theory as any. Folks who believe in a god simply have a reason to believe, and that works for them.

<comment><USER29> I'm not making any judgements either way. I simply stated and the other commenter agreed that there are similarities.</comment></comment></comment>


EMemcached: an Erlang implementation of Memcached - <AUTHOR> http://dustin.github.com/2009/10/11/ememcached.html

<comment><USER2> Leveraging memcached's ubiquity of client libraries as a means to provide other backend services is a cute hack.

<comment><USER3> Seconded. I looked at a lot of the NonSQL alternatives recently when writing my A/B testing framework and ended up settling on MemcacheDB simply because since Rails can already talk to memcached you get persistent, name/value storage for free (from the client's perspective).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very cool, and very readable stuff!</comment>


Google Acquires Jibe Mobile - <AUTHOR> http://www.jibemobile.com/ <comment><USER2> Would this/could this replace Hangouts? Or maybe WebRTC is a good complement for Project Fi?

<comment><USER3> This would be nice, but Google has a habit of buying companies for certain people or certain technologies and just ditches the actual projects the companies are doing.

Sometimes said people or technology are integrated well, sometimes they aren't and we never see those features ever again.

<comment><USER4> Meanwhile Google badly needs to go on a mobile spending spree. Companies I would buy in their position include Localytics, AppsFlyer, Contentful and mParticle. Buying those would significantly increase trust and buy-in from mobile app developers, who today probably have more interest in Facebook and Parse.com than anything else

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Doesn't hurt that Jibe's office is a few blocks from the GPlex I bet.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hopefully this betters the Hangouts app, on Android at least.</comment>


The Joy of Concatenative Languages (Part 2) - <AUTHOR> http://www.codecommit.com/blog/cat/the-joy-of-concatenative-languages-part-2

<comment><USER2> Appreciated the pun in the title. Joy is a purely functional language and the archetype of the concatenated style. The original Joy page is down but here is a mirror <http://www.kevinalbrecht.com/code/joy-mirror/index.html> If I remember correctly there used to be link in the original called "Joy of Programming". If you love this kind of stuff checkout <http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10000360> very entertaining. Amusingly enough Joy's stack based semantics was not something that was explicitly strived for, but emerged as a consequence of its quest for purity and syntactic simplicity.

The post made me check up on CVML. I am delighted that the development on the virtual machine for Cat language has picked up a lot of steam <http://code.google.com/p/cvml/> though with mildly altered name. I was keeping an eye on that last year but I guess the author was occupied with the development on another language he was collaborating on called Heron. Cat I think is the only statically typed language of this family.

A good resource to check up on such languages is <http://concatenative.org/wiki/view/Front%20Page> Postscript probably should have been there as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I tried to follow the really interesting link provided to the Cat Programming Language article on Wikipedia. I got this:

      01:14, 13 April 2011 Ron Ritzman (talk | contribs) deleted "Cat (programming language)"

Why would anyone delete a useful reference to a serious academic article like this?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_(programming_language)#Sema...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_\(programming_language\)#Semantics)

<comment><AUTHOR> You can see the discussion that led to its deletion here:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AArticles_for_deleti...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AArticles_for_deletion%2FLog%2F2011_February_11#Cat_.28programming_language.29)

It looks like the deletionists decided Cat wasn't notable enough to deserve a Wikipedia article about it.

You can read about Wikipedia's notability criteria here:

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Not...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability)</comment></comment>


Investors don't want to meet you.  They wanted to be introduced to you. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.42floors.com/investors-dont-want-meet-wanted-introduced/ <comment><USER2> That seems like a discouraging chicken-and-egg problem for unconnected startup founders.</comment>


Nate Silver's 2016 Election Forecast Microsite - <AUTHOR> http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ <comment><USER2> I think the change that Trump is not going to be GOP candidate his higher than him winning the election (19%)

His campaign has no money, he don't have organization in place to run a campaign, his campaign spends money to buy stuff from Trump companies, party insiders are worried.

If Trump fails to get his ducks in the row before the GOP convention starts, it's possible that delegates choose someone else who was not even in the race (Ryan, Romney). Convention has the ability to change rules on the spot and many Trump delegates are not really his supporters.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like this a lot.

I thought that in the primaries their models and forecasts left a little bit to be desired (in comparison to other news sites), and this more than makes up for it.</comment>


One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/climate/coal-adani-india-australia.html <comment><USER2> > _When the vote came on May 18, it was not, as some had predicted, a > watershed climate change election. Australians, especially in coal country, > voted to keep the incumbent conservative coalition in power._

> _Within days, the Carmichael mine had new momentum._

One billionaire plus the Australian voting majority.

People like to say and act like, "Oh, I'm one person, what I do doesn't matter," but that's rationalizing the decision not to act. Individual behavior makes a difference. I don't just mean using less air conditioning to conserve power, though that matters too. People can influence and lead each other.

</comment><comment><USER3> According to Mark Blyth ( Prof. of political economy at Brown ).

India is going to continue to build 200 more coal powered plants despite knowing exactly how awful climate change is going to be for India.

Pakistan is following similar strategy.

The idea is that Europe/US have more to lose due to climate change, so when time comes they can use these coal fired plants as a bargaining chip ("bribe") for technology transfer, better trade deals, etc.

I do not agree or disagree with his assessment, it could very well be true.

But if you are India, spending MORE money to fix climate change wont make much of a difference as the biggest polluters are US / CHINA / EU.

So a MAD type strategy makes sense from their perspective.

<comment><USER4> Do you have a source for this?

<comment><USER3> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJoe_daP0DE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJoe_daP0DE)

Skip to Q&A

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Many here may not realise that there's massive problems with this crackpot deal cooked up by our politicians: It's actually 'protected' by Indigenous (Aboriginal) Land Rights.

[https://wanganjagalingou.com.au/our- fight/](https://wanganjagalingou.com.au/our-fight/)

> _We do hereby firmly REJECT a Land Use Agreement with Adani for the > Carmichael mine on our traditional lands.

We DO NOT consent to the Carmichael mine on our ancestral lands.

We DO NOT accept Adani's "offers" to sign away our land and our rights and interests in it. We will not take their "shut up" money.

We will PROTECT and DEFEND our Country and our connection to it. _

</comment><comment><USER6> Apparently the profitability of the future Adani mine in Queensland will not be assured [1], however I would guess the coal power plants Adani owns will make up for that.

How can India meet the Paris agreement[2] while letting Adani build new coal power plants?

[1] [https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/the-numbers-on- ada...](https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/the-numbers-on-adani-simply- don-t-add-up-20190524-p51qoy.html)

[2] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Paris...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Paris_Agreement)</comment>


A quick word on which versions of Mega Man X Legacy Collection to get–or avoid - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/07/a-quick-word-on-which-versions-of-mega-man-x-legacy-collection-to-get-or-avoid/ <comment><USER2> Capcom is known for doing this and the games having these exact problems (framerate drop, wall jumping issues etc). The last megaman legacy collection was nearly unplayable because of it. They knew the issue was the emulator running it, and they refused to fix it. Then they release two new legacy collections and they have the same problem, and no one was surprised. Good thing my phone's emulators have no such issues.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some examples of useful data only published in pdf? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Find your favorite useful data and "print as pdf"?</comment>


The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/the-elephant-in-the-room-google-monoculture.html <comment><USER2> Can we get a [2009] in the title?

It would be interesting to see some updated numbers on this, especially from SO. While I don't imagine many programmers are using Bing, it would be interesting to see where DuckDuckGo ranks.

<comment><USER3> OK-doke, here's the last month of Stack Overflow search engine referral traffic.

      Google 69,081,674 visits
      Bing 520,543 visits
      Baidu 319,294
      Search (CBS) 176,208
      Yahoo 133,833
      MSDN 109.875
      Yandex 80.399
      Naver 89,733
      Ask 30,026
      DuckDuckGo 25,492
      AOL 6,409
      Daum 4,462
      Blekko 659

<comment><USER2> Interesting, thanks. I'm actually surprised that Baidu ranks as low as it does, given its overwhelming market share in China and the fact that most code out there is in English. I just did a quick experiment and googled some common errors, then compared the SERPs to those of Baidu. SO was ranked similarly in both. Do Chinese programmers not goog...er, baidu errors?

Actually, that leads me to a more relevant question: looking through the queries that landed visitors at SO, have you done some scraping to determine what proportion were people googling errors verbatim, and what percentage were people asking questions or googling a particular topic, eg "scaling rails"?

<comment><USER4> Baidu is probably used more by non technical people, so I guess software engineers use Google rather than Baidu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _I'm a little surprised all the people who were so up in arms about the Microsoft "monopoly" ten years ago aren't out in the streets today lighting torches and sharpening their pitchforks to go after Google._

Maybe people weren't so up in arms because of Microsoft's _monopoly_ , but rather what they were doing with it. Apple didn't have a monopoly when I stopped being a fan.

<comment><USER6> This is precisely it, Microsoft in the 90s did some really abusive and messed up things, for example luring away Borland's key compiler engineers with ridiculous salaries, and then paying them to sit on their thumbs and do nothing [+], in order to give Microsoft's development tools time to catch up.

I'm not a huge fan of Google, but if you're a startup you don't fear Google the way you would have feared Microsoft in the 90's. And if you're afraid of Google, it's because of legitimate competition in the marketplace, not nefarious anti-competitive practices.

[+] Edit: As pointed out below, the "sitting on their thumbs" may just be local lore, and not true.

<comment><USER7> >This is precisely it, Microsoft in the 90s did some really abusive and messed up things, for example luring away Borland's key compiler engineers with ridiculous salaries, and then paying them to sit on their thumbs and do nothing, in order to give Microsoft's development tools time to catch up.

Why not pay them to build better development tools rather than to sit on their thumbs?

<comment><USER8> Microsoft's development tools were lagging behind Borland's tools in the 90s, but those tools were top-notch nonetheless. Did you know that there are people still happily using Visual Studio 6.0 (1998)?

Also, if you're referring to Anders Hejlsberg, being the lead architect of C# doesn't qualify as "sit on their thumbs". Considering that .NET is one of the 2 competitive advantages that Windows still has in the corporate environment (the other being Exchange), I think it was a million dollars well spent.

<comment><USER9> Actually, I'd put excel (& the massive amount of custom code and extension to it, at least in financial services) way above both of those.

<comment><USER8> I was referring to servers, not desktops.

<comment><USER9> It pains me to admit it but the point still holds. I've lost count of how many places I've seen that have an excel farm cranking stuff out over the last 15 years. Even when they don't go down that path, microsoft technology works (quiet in the back) really well with the rest of the microsoft technology stack (in comparison to with anything else anyway, although it's better these days).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Noting that this article is from 2009, I think it makes some valid points. By owning people's entry to the internet, Google has a monopoly.

But I don't think it's so much a monopoly on search that's interesting, as it is a monopoly on entry. Google is everyone's front door to the Internet. There are a few geeks like us who know about URLs and TLDs, but generally people just google what they're looking for.

And on that note, I think there are other monopolistic gates to the internet being opened. Like the portals of old, Facebook is setting itself up to be the other Front Door on the Internet. Part of that is wrapped in what people care about most: other people. So it makes sense that you go to Google for things, places, and ideas; and you go to Facebook for people.

Google realized it was missing that category of nouns and built Google+. Facebook knows it's missing a lot beyond people and is looking to expand into other nounish categories, but it's also looking to expand into verbs: listen, watch, read.

I don't think Google has a monopoly forever -- I think it's fighting tooth and nail to stay at the top. I think there is fierce competition going on at all levels here, Facebook being the obvious example. And let's not forget Apple, Comcast, and other media providers who are using their control of media experiences to leverage control over people's experience of the Internet.

The future is going to be interesting!

</comment><comment><USER11> I think one reason people aren't sharpening pitchforks and lighting torches is because every other search engine is one click away. Switching search engines is pretty frictionless compared to switching OSes.

<comment><USER12> In theory. Do the nontechnical people in your life even know other search engines exist? I doubt those in mine do.

<comment><USER13> According to Alexa, Yahoo! is the #4 site on the internet, and Windows Live is the #7 site. So the millions of people who have Yahoo! and Windows Live for their homepages (and this is very common--remember that IE is still the dominant browser, and it defaults to Windows Live) are aware of those search engines.

The reason Google is the search leader is not because nontechnical people don't know of the alternatives. It's the leader because it's synonymous with search and people think it's the best.

<comment><USER14> Google is often set as the default search engine for IE in preinstalled OEM configurations (and frequently these days Chrome is the default browser). For antitrust reasons Microsoft can do nothing about this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Okay, am I missing something?

Microsoft wasn't a monopoly because their software pervaded rampantly; Microsoft was a monopoly because their entire business model bastardized the notion of vertical integration by making alternate software (ie competition) impossible, furthered by the costs of developing IE being (allegedly) baked into Windows.

Is the "Google = Monopoly" argument that their bundling of GMail/Search/Plus/etc./etc. is discouraging competition?

<comment><USER16> _"Microsoft wasn't a monopoly because their software pervaded rampantly"_

Sure it was, but it's not illegal to have a monopoly. However, using your monopoly in one market to break into another, that's frowned upon. Google might have already been doing that with the promotion of Chrome on their site.

Also, Google's integration of Google+ in their search results pages sure is giving their own social network a leg up over sites like Facebook and Twitter [1]. Whether that legally means they're abusing their monopoly, I don't know.

[1] [http://searchengineland.com/examples-google-search-plus- driv...](http://searchengineland.com/examples-google-search-plus-drive- facebook-twitter-crazy-107554)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Any suggestions from people who have switched from Google to another search engine?

I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, but I gave up after a few days. DuckDuckGo's results were very good for popular/mainstream terms, but Google is much better at deep "needle in haystack" searches.

I later switched from Google to Bing, but I gave up after one day. Bing's results were very random and stale. And Bing is ugly. :)

<comment><USER18> You could always just use DDG by default, and then resort to Google only when you really need it. That's what I've been doing for 1 - 2 years now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm really interested in hearing how people think this problem should be fixed, since Google having such a large market share is _necessarily_ a bad thing. I see a lot of criticism, but no solution offering. But it's implied in all the anti-Google comments that either Google needs to stop making its product better, or it needs to be forcefully hampered by the government. Is this a correct assessment? If not, what are the alternatives?

<comment><USER20> One alternative might be celebrating startups, and entrepreneurs, who publicly declare (pro- or retroactively) refusing acquisitions -from Google, or otherwise.

One of the non-obvious consequences of this monopoly is all the other ways by which you could've navigated the Internet, that has been bought, paid for, then rapidly shut down by Google.

Note there are many other ways you can acquire information that is relevant, and timely for you -social&topical communities, Q&A sites&channels, decision trees are but a few- it just happens that search got an early start on the R&D economies of scale.

<comment><USER19> I can get behind your first suggestion. Social influence can be huge, and it doesn't require a legal club to beat a company down with.

Do you think it's necessarily a bad thing when smaller companies get bought by Google? What you don't mention in the case that all startups refuse a buyout is that the #1 search product improves at a much slower rate. Their technology may be interesting and useful, but in itself not enough to draw consumers, while if it were integrated into a larger product, it could bring that new technology to many more people much more quickly. Do we gain more by using technologies as individual products than we do by using them as parts of a larger, integrated whole? Probably sometimes we do. But always?

I can't say I'm familiar with all the things you mention in your last point. But if I knew about all of them, understood their purpose and what value they served, do you think I would use them all? I feel like I would probably just type a Google search, which could potentially search all of those for me. I know social, I know Q&A - it doesn't really seem to me that with just those services, I would have a set of tools as powerful as Google itself. I use them on occasion, but for specific things. Search engines are general purpose question answerers - it seems like this is why they're more popular. I think if all of those services were out first, and _then_ Google came along, it'd still be the most powerful and grow to be huger, because in general, it's more useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The other Elephant in the room - with rich Javascript interfaces, crawlers are only feasible to build if you have enough resources - i.e. only companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are able to do it. Web pages are becoming increasingly less accessible and Google has a lot to gain by this trend.

The writing on the wall is pretty clear - Google has a monopoly in search and the only way they can be disrupted is through alternative means of finding content (like social networks).

Which is why, as much as I like them and their products, I find the integration with Google+ downright scary and dangerous for the health of our ecosystem.

<comment><USER21> That's not really true - John Resig hooked Rhino up to a good-enough DOM model in a weekend:

<http://ejohn.org/blog/bringing-the-browser-to-the-server/>

No, you're not going to match Google's crawling infrastructure or data extraction libraries. But if you just want to grab pages off the web, parse them, and handle JavaScript from those pages correctly, you can easily rig something up between Mechanize/html5lib/V8 or Nutch/Tika/Rhino.

<comment><USER8> Crawling a couple of pages is different from crawling the entire web on a recurring basis. It was hard enough without the emergence of Javascript- enabled pages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> He makes a legit point, and he even raises the "Microsoft Monoculture" issue, asking why the folks alarmed about MSFT aren't alarmed by GOOG. I think they (and we) should be alarmed.

Nevertheless, where are all the people, pundits, piemen and PR flacks that arose back when Dan Geer et al raised that monoculture issue? Whenever someone seriously raises a software monoculture as an issue, The Big Guns come out to discredit that someone, and to dismiss the issue. Where are the pundits now?

</comment><comment><USER23> _> But where's the healthy competition? Where's the incentive for Google to improve?_

People here might not like this answer, but honestly, Facebook. Look at Google+. You can like it or not, but it's clear that it's the biggest change to Google's product in a while.

</comment><comment><USER24> I mean the difference is that a search engine is a search engine - it's not a platform a whole bunch of people need to be using to be more effective. Ditching Microsoft in the 90s meant ditching Office, the best selection of games, etc. Whereas every other search engine works just as well (potentially) as Google search.

</comment><comment><USER25> <http://mashable.com/2012/01/12/bing-overtakes-yahoo/...The> latest from mashable. Google still waaay ahead in 1st place. Notable is that when Bing first came out many blogs were talking about what was wrong with it and why it would die. They've slowly come a logn way(helped in part by Yahoo's problems). Do they have what it takes to be the thorn in google's flesh that xbox is in Sony's?

</comment><comment><USER26> I haven't looked at every comment to see if anyone has stated the obvious: search is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more data you have, the better your results. The better your results, the more data you get.

No one will make up ground on Google until a radical new algorithm is invented, and Google doesn't buy it :)

<comment><USER27> I don't think it's a matter of data access. I would argue that Bing has parity with Google in most respects (they have the same Internet to crawl, partnerships with some data providers for things like flight search, etc.), and they even have decisive advantages in other areas, like access to huge piles of social data. So why aren't they as good or better?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Google doesn't lock people into its search. People have a choice and they obviously choose Google.

<comment><USER29> Website authors don't have a choice though. It's be on google or don't exist.

<comment><USER28> That's not Google's fault. Google made a better product and consumers freely chose this. If Google arrives at a monopoly because of building a better product there is nothing wrong with this, but if Google arrives at a monopoly through manipulation and anti-competitive practices and then further using that monopoly position to sustain the monopoly then that's wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> That is a must I would say in our era.

See, given one of the fundamentals in the Unix philosophical idiom is _Make each program do one thing well_.

In an era of Software as a Service, it is _Make each service do one thing well_.

</comment><comment><USER31> Let's be clear first on what Google's product is and what it's selling.

Google's product is pageviews (or eyes). It sources these pageviews effectively for free (from you and I) and sells them to companies. The end- user who does the search is a marginal piece of the product that Google is selling.

Therefore you can't say Google has a monopoly on search, because there is no market for search, since no one is paying for a product called search.

edit:spelling

</comment><comment><USER32> Here are the numbers for one of my sites, not related to IT in any way:

        Google   94.3%
        Yahoo     2.6%
        Bing      1.8%
        Yandex    0.63%
        Ask       0.37%
        AOL       0.23%

EDIT:

Here's another non-IT site with 13 million monthly visits:

        Google   89.9%
        Yahoo     6.4%
        Bing      2.96%
        Ask       0.37%
        AOL       0.21%
        Yandex    0.12%

<comment><USER33> So my 2011 figures (for a site for English Speaking SF/Fantasy fans) are about GOOG: 95% / Bing: 3% / Yahoo 2%

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This blog post is from 2009!!! An in-page search for 2012 gets zero results.</comment>