Ask HN: Do websites really sell for ~1 P/E? - <AUTHOR>

I stumbled on to this website: http://www.websitebroker.com/ where people put sites up to buy and sell. Looking at the listings, I find some sites selling for $280, with $26 per month current profits. Another lists for $780 with $160 current profits, etc, etc. You'll make back the price in less than a year for most of those sites...<p>I feel tempted to buy one of those cheap ones and just collect passive income for a year. But then... why are they selling? Or is it all an illusion and everyone is trying to rip everyone off? <comment><USER2> flippa.com is the one I am most familiar with. Some of these are legit. Others are propped up with paid and black-hat traffic to get the analytics and CPC up until after a sale it made.

<comment><USER3> How do you tell the difference before the sale? What are things to look for?</comment></comment>


Inside Larry Page's Kitty Hawk: Returned Deposits, Battery Fires, Boeing Shakeup - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2019/12/01/inside-larry-pages-kitty-hawk-returned-deposits-battery-fires-boeing-cora/#40ad689758ab <comment><USER2> The anti-safety culture is kind of surprising. When they made previous announcements I thought that safety was what they were bringing to the table. Autonomous drones, even large scale ones, are pretty ubiquitous at this point. People are building human-scale drones using off the shelf equipment in their back gardens. The thing they're all lacking is properly safety certified electronics. I would have thought the thing a project with deep pockets like kitty hawk would bring would be the huge effort required to build a certifiably safe done.

Having worked in other hardware startups though, I'm guessing what actually happened was a few years of reinventing the wheel and learning on the job. Safe systems don't look any different to non safe systems to an outsider, so unless there's a real buy in from management it's very hard to build them.

<comment><USER3> Before talking about anti-safety culture, I observed that the real issue in a purely hardware/software-driven culture is that people focus on technology. For safety systems, this usually fails / overbudgets because there needs to be some systems thinking /before/ about why and how the proposed system can be declared safe. In the case of drones, I am afraid that the systems design to make these devices acceptably safe is yet to be formulated (Note: these are not planes, they fly close to the ground so they do not benefit from the safety of altitude to have time to react in case of failure)

<comment><USER4> Helicopters are certifiable for carrying passengers, and yet take offs and landings have no altitude nor speed benefits.

In what way do multirotors / drones differ?

<comment><USER5> I know exactly nothing about aircraft safety, but since this is HN, I want to throw out a guess: in case of landing, could it be that helicopters make the blades spin very fast prior to beginning the landing maneuver, compensating for extra lift with pitch control, and then keep them spinning fast throughout the entire landing process, and brake them only after touchdown? This would, in my mind, let them do a soft touchdown via autorotation in case of sudden engine failure at any point of the landing maneuver (at least if the pilot has fast enough reflexes).

<comment><USER6> I'm going to go on a limb here, you'd need to put enough energy into the rotors of: helicopter weight * recovery time (so distance * descent rate) * gravity². that is a big number to get rotor mass * rpm to equal.

<comment><USER5> Autorotation is already the standard emergency landing practice in case of loss of engine power mid-flight; I'm only guessing that landings could be performed in such a way as to maintain the capability for autorotation throughout the maneuver.

<comment><USER6> That's what I was trying to explain, that energy to maintain rotor speed in an autorotation is stored in the height. To replace that is a damn big number you're putting somewhere else. Maybe landing rockets like the soyuz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "It was a pattern — if you talked about safety you were done, so you just > didn't," said one former employee. "That's just how it had to be if you > wanted to keep getting a paycheck."

Sounds like a problem with management, which isn't surprising. Sebastian Thrun is a brilliant researcher, but he has yet to turn any of his ideas into sustainable technologies or companies. Self-driving cars aren't real yet, and Udacity is going through some rough times. To the best of my knowledge Udacity has never been profitable (please correct me if I am wrong).

[https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/22/sebastian-thrun- initiates-...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/22/sebastian-thrun-initiates- aggressive-plan-to-transform-udacity/)

Maybe he'll turn around Udacity (I doubt it, although I really hope so). My point is this man chases after shiny things, and then leaves as soon as there's another shiny thing for him to pursue. He does the fun stuff with early development, and then loses interest when you get to the hard slog of making everything sustainable.

Similar to self-driving cars, he was able to get his flying machines working well enough for some really awesome demos - but he can't commercialize the technology because it's still demoware.

I want to compare this to Icarus because superficially it's so appealing, but in the end Sebastian is going to be incredibly wealthy and never having really lost anything. He will even likely continue to be heralded as a genius by many (and sometimes rightfully so).

<comment><USER8> That first quote is really a massive indictment for an aviation company - it's diametrically opposed to how it should be ("safety culture" and all).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I work at a company doing something very similar, owned by an aerospace giant as well.

We are led to believe that safety is the most important aspect of any part of our work. At least that's what we're told at group meetings and company-wide meetings. But when push comes to shove and the (arbitrary) schedule demand a test, hacky code is produced, checks fall off the list, and errors do happen.

Progress seems to be more important than safety. We are instructed to show some sort of significant return on investment within 6-12 months for the funding we've received. It's pretty sad.

Telling mangers that we need to take it low and slow at first makes them angry and ignore the engineers who do the good work in exchange for engineers who do it fast.

<comment><USER10> Scariest comment on HN in a long time.

Also, you probably think you're anonymous and safe in setting this comment out here but you and your employer are trivially identifiable from this comment and a couple of others made on HN so you may want to petition the mods to kill this comment on the off chance that your employer gets wind of this, it might be a career limiting thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wouldn't have expected a Google related project to deathmarch like this. Energy density was always going to be the problem. The Lithium ion chemistries are just not there yet. These guys know what they are doing: [https://skai.co/](https://skai.co/) Vid: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhMP5237dGA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhMP5237dGA)

<comment><USER8> Minor nitpick: Energy density is energy per volume. What's crucial here is specific energy, ie energy per mass.

<comment><USER11> <3

Some days I love hacker news.

<comment><USER7> The most impressive thing is he did it in a friendly manner! Sometimes I'm pretty bad at correcting people without sounding like an asshole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It boggles my mind how many of these human transporter designs have the props low to the ground. How the hell is a passenger supposed to egress in case of emergency when the blades are running?

<comment><USER13> There are other reasons for rotors to be overhead, as well. Locating the center of mass below the center of thrust makes a more stable system. Viewing the ground, which is something that many passengers would desire, is much easier when there isn't a bunch of machinery in the way. The further rotors are from the ground, the less likely they are to strike debris when landing and taking off.

I'm trying to think of reasons it would be good to have low rotors... maybe something about noise experienced by the passengers?

<comment><USER14> Getting them high enough up would require a larger super structure supporting them and would look pretty goofy to get them high enough up that a standing person wouldn't risk hitting them. These can also be stopped pretty quickly just by shorting all the motor leads together so stopping them in an emergency isn't very hard.

<comment><USER12> I'll go with goofy looking and keep my legs. :)

<comment><USER14> The other thing is these are meant for operation over water so if you have crashed it will be into water and the blades will stop very quickly due to the drag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "No person has ever been harmed or exposed due to undue risk in over 26,000 test flights with over 100 prototype vehicles,"

Well that isn't exactly difficult to achieve if no one was on it. I'd like to know the data if it was carrying a crash dummy.

<comment><USER16> Also that is such a contrieved way of saying "no person has ever been harmed in over 26,000 test flights". There must be something the "due to undue risk" clarification hides.

<comment><USER17> I read that as there were injuries, but they were due to risks that had to be taken, not risks that were carelessly taken.

<comment><USER8> Good point. One could say that nobody has ever been injured or died in civil aviation due to undue risk (except maybe where the captain let his kid fly the jet for a bit, that might be considered "undue"...)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_593](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_593)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Steve Jobs was famous for his "reality distortion zone" \- simply not believing that something could not be done.

Early on in a project you need vision and innovation, "fake it 'till you make it".

Get a demo working, even if it only works 20% of the time or covers one use case poorly.

But at some point, along comes actual reality.

<comment><USER19> Faking it is really a bad model - the number of Steve Jobs "prepared to use sleight of hand to hide loading times" is vastly out numbered by expensive failed replacements.

The most defensible practice are at least inherently modular and could be stitched together - really the deception would be highly unnecessary

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > required to report safety-related issues to their managers, or through a > confidential digital channel directly to the general counsel and human > resources

What. How is it appropriate fo HR to be involved in reports of safety issues. This reads like there was confidential channel to self selection layoffs.

</comment><comment><USER21> EHang is making short flights with people aboard.[1] The EHang 216, a one- person drone-like craft, has 16 props on 8 booms, so there's some redundancy. But not enough battery life to go very far.

[1] [https://youtu.be/7RjstNDRuCQ](https://youtu.be/7RjstNDRuCQ)

<comment><USER8> Volocopter has been making manned flights since 2016 (see links below). It has 18 rotors (at least 3 can fail while leaving it completely controllable) and 9 independent battery packs.

And, in particular, it doesn't have the people-decapitating and knee-cap- smashing rotors below the passenger capsule, but above (like a conventional helicopter).

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhNJUyT3HI8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhNJUyT3HI8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The flyer has lot of anti-intuitive designs for example 6 massive fans whirring around the pilot.

What if there is bird strike or the blades somehow dismantle from the fan and fly towards the pilot.

Also this being made for non professional pilots/passengers what if a passenger tries to board/de-board while the fans are still spinning?

At this point, I assume the aircraft keeps morphing into whatever the next iteration of managers/designers deem highest priority to keep the company afloat

</comment><comment><USER23> I hate Forbes.com articles with a burning hate in my heart. The ads. Oh my god - stop it!</comment>


On Motivating Programmers - <AUTHOR> http://particletree.com/notebook/on-motivating-programmers/ <comment><USER2> This sort of post shows how doomed some managers are.

I think the question "how do I motivate programmers" comes up when the business model is "think up an idea for software, write functional specs, hire programmers, have them code it." If you're going to take this approach, then I suppose "motivating" your programmers will be important to you.

But this is like asking your tennis coach how to generate more power when hitting the ball late off your heels. If you insist on hitting the ball this way, there are a few techniques that can help you make the best of a bad situation. But the player who gets to the ball early is going to beat you 9 times in 10.</comment>


PHP Dark Arts: Multi-Processing (Part 2) - <AUTHOR> http://www.re-cycledair.com/php-dark-arts-multi-processing-part-2

<comment><USER2> On a somewhat related but more "accessible" possibility, I recently discovered you can do a trick with register_shutdown_function, remove the execution time limit and then disconnect the web client entirely, while continuing processing.

So using ajax on the client side, you could say open a dozen connections and purposely disconnect them while continuing processing, technically in parallel (though not in the same process).

Can't fathom a practical use for this at the moment but it's still an interesting ability.

<comment><USER3> > Can't fathom a practical use

Update anything that the client doesn't need to wait for. Visitor stats, page view stats, notifications about sent messages if you use some distributed queues, any deferred post-processing...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.re-cycledair.com/php-dark-arts-multi-threading- pa...](http://www.re-cycledair.com/php-dark-arts-multi-threading-part-1) For those that missed part 1.

</comment><comment><USER5> Don't bother trying to implement something complicated with multi-processing in PHP. The article defeats itself: "If you need multi-threading, use a different language."

<comment><USER6> Oh yeah? Why not?

We built a self-scaling multi-processing conversion system entirely in php @ <http://massify.com/>. In like 2-3 weeks. Had it deployed a week after that. It's been running for 2+ years with zero maintenance and handles all of the video, image, audio and office docs -> swf conversions. It's not a trivial system, but for what it does is simple enough to be beautiful despite the language it was built in.

It was designed to completely share nothing, message based, isolated, fault tolerant. I could go into the architecture more if you are interested.

Now Massify is not youtube scale, but this could scale to that size with minor adjustment (mostly with balancing uploads to the upload handlers). In it's current incarnation, the thing will scale by itself to whatever restraint Amazon puts on it.

We had one film contest were we watched the thing spin up a ton of ec2 instances and then tear them down when it was done. It was a little like watching an army of media converting robots.

So I was going to write this long winded thing about why I used PHP to do it, but at the end of the day it really doesn't matter. All that matters is that it works and works well. If writing this kind of stuff in PHP doesn't appeal to you, then cool, good for you. But your notion that it can't be done or done well is not grounded in any kind of reality.

<comment><USER7> Interesting. I would like to see some more details on that solution?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pretty much just a thin abstraction of c functions.</comment>


MGM to post full movies, TV shows on YouTube - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2008/11/10/MN92141BD2.DTL <comment><USER2> Previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=358677>

As I said on that thread: YouTube is such an ugly site, I can't imagine liking watching an entire movie on it.

<comment><USER3> You can maximize the videos to full screen.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, and - as I said up front in the other thread - YouTube doesn't eliminate their menu bar once you do that, unlike every one of their competitors. I also pointed out that YouTube can't handle the file quality that the other sites do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> i bet videos will only be available to north-americans though.</comment>


The $9.99 Textbook - <AUTHOR> http://jasonlbaptiste.com/jason-l-baptiste-random-thoughts/999-textbook/ <comment><USER2> I don't really want to see textbooks change that much, at least the good ones that is in any aspect other than cost.

I have only used one electronic textbook and I found that paper books are much easier to use in every way except for cost. Searching a electronic textbook might be okay but I find indexes are very easy to use most of the time and the rest of the time you aren't looking for the right thing.

On the subject of having facebook to help understand concepts I always find that interaction on a face to face basis for learning is much quicker and if you go to a large enough college it is relatively easy to find people in your class out in the common area for help.

Some of my best books, like the Hibbeler books on statics, dynamics, and mechanics of materials (<http://www.pearsonhighered.com/hibbeler/>), are very good and were well worth the money I paid for them.

One thing that I hate about textbooks is that certain publishers have cornered the market, at least in the engineering and math departments, and many schools offer horrible textbooks that only the students notice because they are the ones learning for the first time. A prime example of this is the publisher Wiley, I have had books from this publisher from differential equations all the way up to fluid dynamics that were just awful for anything other than problems and basic concepts.

Edit: I have had a couple classes that were rather amazing on the textbook stance, especially for engineering, that the teacher had a large enough collection of notes and slides that they were able to make a rather cheap textbook available to students on campus for around 20 dollars, those books always seem to provide good information and good quality that maybe a 9 dollar digital textbook could work in that sense.

<comment><USER3> _the teacher had a large enough collection of notes and slides that they were able to make a rather cheap textbook available to students on campus for around 20 dollars_

The original article links to Seth Godin's blog which advocates something very close to that.

[http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/textbook- ran...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/textbook-rant.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> this is what I think could be the answer/an alternative answer. I have a basic theory:

"Anything you want to learn is accessible online via existing content or smart people you can connect with. Someone just needs to organize it all"

The answer I usually get is something like, well, yeah Google, but that's a pretty primary way to go about it. If you want to learn RoR for the first time, you might pick up a book, but you'll probably scour the net utilizing different sites. So why not organize the content that already exists into a more structured manner that slightly resembles chapter ie- programming 101 go here, setting up apache go here, learning about sessions go here, interacting with MySQL go here, etc.

<comment><USER2> This (using the internet) is usually limited to things like programming and lower level classes though, I can see an entire software engineering curriculum being laid out with minimal references and books but I cannot see any such thing for degrees in math, science (such as physics), engineering (mechanical, electrical, civil), and so on.

Some things just need that extra bit that an established textbook can bring.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been trying to see if that's true or not. I still think any topic has enough information/resources out there. When you say things like math+science, are you referring to very advanced topics or simpler topics (or both) ie- algebra, high school chemistry,etc.

<comment><USER2> Math is easy to find (to an extent): <http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/>

Other subjects are a bit more difficult and scattered, for physics hyperphysics does well

But I am indeed talking about advanced topics which are available in abundance for computer science and programming on the internet but when it comes down to it that is the extent which the internet provides (except maybe graduate papers, but that is usually too high a level to matter)

Say for example you wanted to learn thermodynamics with only the internet and a teacher. You can gain a large amount of theoretical knowledge from the teacher but without a book it will be hard for you to find examples on when/how to use integral and differential energy and entropy balances (Thermo might be a subject just on the boundary of finding information on the internet and having to buy a book).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Having worked at a company that made both Kindle and printed books, here's something to think about- if someone can make a Kindle book for $9.99 (and this seems low, even for a book, let alone a text book), they can make a printed book for $19.99.

The problem isn't that books are printed on paper- paper is cheap.

If teachers contributed to and utilized wikibooks.org (or similar services), we could have free textbooks (or, low cost, if you choose to buy/print them- and, there are services that will let you print wikimedia wikis).

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious why wikibooks hasn't taken off like it should. I don't know if the content isn't engaging enough or if the formatting is off.

<comment><USER5> Wikibooks doesn't reward the authors at all. Wikibooks doesn't pay them money, it doesn't put their name on their work, and it doesn't let their contribution last forever -- others can go and muck it up with their editing. (If anything I've said here is wrong, then let's say it's the perception of these problems that is the problem.)

Also, the current books aren't particularly good and the syntax for editing them is arcane.

<comment><USER6> Project Gutenberg, Flickr, and Wikipedia (to cite just three examples... there are _many_ more) don't pay their contributers money. On Wikipedia contributions can be mucked with by others. Yet these sites are all wildly successful.

<comment><USER7> Short articles on a specific topic require little coordination among contributors. A book used for class can't have redundant sections. Each part needs to build upon the previous sections (for math, anyway). The book should have a consistent style.

Anyway, that's what khanacademy.org is for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Counterexample: What about a reader? These are common both in literature and the social sciences, but the best example is a collection of short stories.

In a reader, the editor must pay each one of these authors something. In a juvinile reader, count on 30 stories. (source: [http://activities.macmillanmh.com/reading/treasures/stories/...](http://activities.macmillanmh.com/reading/treasures/stories/storylist/41.html) as an example.) On top of that, there are questions, extra resources, and accompanying teacher material to write. And you're going to be able to pay for all this in 7 bucks?

Perhaps if we limit this to single/dual author textbooks, we can start talking about it. It could be an interesting disruptive system when it comes to tenure, for sure. (Without the curated system, academia will have to adapt.)

<comment><AUTHOR> this relates to my thoughts in one of the comments below:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1076436>

Why not just curate links and existing content for learning something?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The price is not that important. In a wealthy western nation, $100 for a textbook is quite reasonable, if you're spending any amount of time reading it. Compare that to the price of a lecture.

Ebooks mainly give incremental improvements. The one big improvement is searchability. I suppose search on Google books now suffices.

Even if we count that, the benefit of e-books is marginal. Getting incremental patches is nice in certain fields -- those that change a lot over a decade. The patching of errata is generally useful though. Having comments on textbooks would be, well, I don't know if that would be useful. That sort of thing tends to produce a lot of pedantic comments or other comments on stuff the reader shouldn't be distracted by. Consider the comments on the PHP documentation. So much of it is wrong. It's the sort of thing that would require moderation, so I suppose reader->author communication would be the path. But what author wants to spend time on that?

Also, it's better for communities to develop around a piece of subject matter than a particular ebook sold in a particular format -- these can include different textbooks at the same time, can include people who get dead-tree textbooks, and can include discussion that extends beyond what textbooks talk about. It doesn't really make sense for a textbook to come with a forum attached.

I think the trouble with all these ideas is that they all worsen the signal- to-noise ratio. The nicest part about e-book textbooks is the low price and open market. Looking back at my past, it seems the biggest inefficiency in my learning was in deciding what to learn, not how I learned it. I think that problem should be what we want to tackle the most (and $9.99 might help quite a bit there, since people can then get a cheap taste of the material).

<comment><USER9> The price is unreasonable, because no one would pay that price if given the choice.

The only reason textbooks cost $100 is due to agency costs: the person choosing the textbook is not the person paying for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> yup, that's why textbooks are a broken economic model. If the quality is good, a professor would certainly choose a far less expensive book. Many of my professors usually suggest how to get the book cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I do like the idea of the PHP documentation style comments, high quality reviewed comments that add to the text.

Maybe the answer is open text books. Schools most of the time, especially in K-12 wouldn't think about writing there own text book, but the combined power of teachers all over the world could surely produce texts that are far better than what we have today and I think a lot of teachers would contribute if it was just some pages here and there on things they were passionate about and the school sponsored them.

Sure you could still do limited publishing runs of this resource for people who would rather have a physical copy but it would mainly live online.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's nice that this came up, since I'll be doing research on it for school for the next 3 terms. It seems that there are several reasons for slow change:

* What do you do with all the middlemen (publisher's work, logistics) that are made redundant? Fire them?

* There is a theory saying that people perceive e-books to have lower value than printed ones because it's not touchable / feelable (I don't agree with this)

* Authors like to have everything else (proofreading and publicity are two major ones) taken care of by their publishers.

* Publishers are also a mark of status, like scientific journals. Getting a deal with, say, Oreilly automatically sets the author apart.

* Students are pretty much locked in to the books that their instructors choose and so textbook publishers take advantage of this fixed audience that is guaranteed to buy the books no matter what. Making it cheaper would be a loss to them.

There are many others I can't think of off the top of my head but this seems to be the gist of it.

</comment><comment><USER12> One big improvement in educational content i can think of , is the addition of personalized content, that fits to your learning style.It seem to really improve learning.

Of course this fits very well to computerized platforms , and works nicely with 70% revenue share. This could be a much stronger disruption of the text book market.

<comment><AUTHOR> can you give me an example/explain further?

<comment><USER12> """Guaranteach is powered by a vast library of short video math tutorials and a sophisticated array of learning algorithms which allows the software to intelligently guide a student at their own pace, and on their own customized path through the math curriculum. As the software learns about each student's preferences for teaching styles, it selects the optimal tutor and video to maximize the chance of the student understanding the concept. If you're struggling with the concept of differentiation from first principles – Guaranteach has tens of short (1-2 minute) math tutorials on the concept, all created by different teachers, with their own unique explanations, diagrams and methods for conveying the concept. Search for the one you want, or let Guaranteach recommend what's best for you."""

<http://www.guaranteach.com/welcome/about>

I see no reason for this idea to be applied for higher education , and for written content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Since facts can't be copyrighted, and texts have plenty of facts that don't change much between generations, cheap texts in fundamentals could certainly be produced _if_ professionals are hired to update the facts every few years.

Texts are dinosaur delivery systems for info. They leave the pretty-much untouched question of individualized computer-assisted learning wide-open ... a field which hasn't begun to emerge but most certainly will. The recent Khan Academy post here <http://www.khanacademy.org/> is one pointer to a different future.

</comment><comment><USER5> Check out that toolbar!

Sorry, but I couldn't concentrate on the article, there was popup advertising from the website telling me how awesome it was and it was too distracting.

<comment><AUTHOR> im thinking of taking that off. it was cool at first+people used it, but now it doesn't really add anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> update: gone and way much better. Thank you for the feedback.</comment></comment></comment>


DataNitro (YC S12) launches Python for Microsoft Excel - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/10/python-for-microsoft-excel-company-ironspread-comes-out-of-beta-changes-name-to-data-nitro/

<comment><USER3> I remember being so excited about this product that I sent a msg to the IronSpread team thanking them for their work, even though I hadn't even used their product yet. (I'd never done that before for any product)

It's great to see this taking off (and I had no idea it was part of YC until now), and am looking forward to future updates!

Best of luck to the team :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks hkmurakami! - founder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please take my money if you port VBA on top of your Python runtime. And take even more money if said embedded Python runtime is available on Openoffice as well. [1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360454>

<comment><USER4> BTW, I'm not so sure Python in the right choice for this integration.

Whitespace sensitivity is (arguably) a nice developer mind trick, however the target market for VBA are non-developers, who want to google for stuff, copy paste and get on with it. Which means, you cannot make assumptions about things like editors honoring whitespace, as well as the cognitive processes to rely on spacing etc.

This is why I strongly believe Python is the wrong language for this - <USER2> some language is definitely needed (Lua ? Javascript? Ruby?)

<comment><USER5> With VBA, you can't just copy-paste code from google - it's rare that you'll find something that does _exactly_ what you want it to do on your specific spreadsheet. Readability, then, becomes important - and Python is easier to parse and edit for someone with basic programming skills than VBA is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Previous (2 months old) discussion here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4085052>

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice work. Some piece of feedback: documentation is lacking any information on how to interact with VBA functionality/classes that you don't have your wrappers for. E.g. how do I work with creating/opening/interacting with other workbooks?

</comment><comment><USER8> Great job guys! I'd love to know bit more about the exact benefits of using Python and a few simple examples of how to use it... then again, I am just a casual excel user so I am likely not the right audience

<comment><USER5> Thanks! We have some basic examples up on our blog. A good one is blackjack in Excel [1] - it shows off some of the versatility of Python as compared to VBA, like the ability to run a script in the background and have it respond to user actions.

[1] [https://datanitro.com/blog/2012/07/31/Interactive- Spreadshee...](https://datanitro.com/blog/2012/07/31/Interactive-Spreadsheets- blackjack/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Congrats guys love this stuff have been using it for a couple of months. The people who work on the Excel team were really impressed when I demoed it to them. Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER10> I think this is so awesome, I spent a summer as a lowly intern for a bank once trying to write up an entire debt model in VBA (bad idea on so many fronts...), and I wanted to gouge my eyes out at the end. I would've given an arm and a leg to be able to write in Python, as I'm sure many others...so excited to see this happen!

</comment><comment><USER11> Why the name change?

<comment><USER5> One of the founders here - people kept confusing us with IronPython, and/or assuming we use IronPython.

<comment><USER12> Might want to change the address in your user profile as well!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there currently any way to use Python in a Google Document spreadsheet?

<comment><USER14> Use a Python-to-JS compiler with Google Apps Script.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> FYI, for Java there's XLLoop (open source), JExcel (commercial) and Obba (commercial). Haven't used these myself, but looking into it.

<comment><USER16> xlloop works for a bunch of languages, python, ruby, etc... But as far as i remember, xlloop is more of an RPC facility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Oh wow, YC!! I'm sure the product would be awesome. Let me check out the link.

</comment><comment><USER18> Any comparison with ResolverOne and why they have a better chance to succeed?

</comment><comment><USER19> Awesome work guys.

</comment><comment><USER20> Congrats guys.</comment>


Show HN: Rendering black holes with Haskell - <AUTHOR> https://flannelhead.github.io/projects/blackstar.html <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN!

I thought I would share this little writeup on a project I'm quite proud of. The code can be found on GitHub [0]. This article is mostly about the implementation of the simulation in Haskell. I've also written another article [1] on the physics of the simulation. It should be approachable even for those without any general relativity background.

[0] [https://github.com/flannelhead/blackstar](https://github.com/flannelhead/blackstar)

[1] [https://flannelhead.github.io/posts/2016-03-06-photons- and-b...](https://flannelhead.github.io/posts/2016-03-06-photons-and-black- holes.html)

<comment><USER2> Very cool work! You should be proud of it.

One idea that you might think about adding is redshifting the light that comes off the accretion disk. If the light is monochromatic coming off the disk, then the areas of the disk closer to the horizon should look more red to a distant observer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the compliment and suggestion! The redshift would be interesting to do, I'll consider that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> At the end you say:

>Let me remind you that these are not the real equations of motion for the photon. The real equations of motion would have been achieved by calculating all of the geodesic equations from the Lagrangian. There are four of them instead of the three equations (in vector form) above. However, the three spatial equations will generate the exact same spatial curve as the real geodesic equations would, and they were relatively easily achieved.

What do you mean that these are not the real equations of motion for the photon, but that they give the exact same spatial curve as the real geodesic equations? Are there cases where these equations would not give the exact same curve as the real geodesic equations?

<comment><AUTHOR> That statement is indeed a bit vague. Let me elaborate:

In the process of deriving the said equations, an equation for the radial coordinate of the photon was achieved. This was identified with a classical, Newtonian system of one particle with unity mass. As the real, massless photon lives in four-dimensional spacetime and the said massive "test particle" lives in three-dimensional space, these systems just can't be dynamically the same (in spacetime, the massive particle would take a timelike curve).

To reword the statement, the derived "equation of motion" will yield the same trajectory in the spacelike components (x, y, z), but possibly with a different parametrization - in the classical system, we're integrating the equations of motion with respect to the time. However, this has nothing to do with the "coordinate time" of the four-vectors nor the proper time of the particle (for the photon, proper time doesn't even make sense).

Hope this helps! You could also see [0] for an alternative take on this derivation. I will try and clarify my article a bit as well.

[0] [http://rantonels.github.io/starless/](http://rantonels.github.io/starless/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> GIFs? ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe in the future, and in small resolution. Right now the renderer doesn't have any animation functionality, but this is definitely something I've been considering.</comment></comment>


Has Elon Musk's Tesla already won? - <AUTHOR> https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Has-Elon-Musk-s-Tesla-already-won <comment><AUTHOR> >We can debate the merits of this sense of corporate responsibility. The fact remains, though, that Musk's operation is not hampered by this galaxy of moving parts. By keeping many of these functions in-house, Tesla can innovate 24/7 and implement a new technology tomorrow, not in 2025.

There is a quote I'm fond of; to paraphrase: To go fast, go alone, to go far, go together.

I while I think that TSLA is doing a great job at innovation, it does seem to be leaving a lot of jobs in uncertainty.

On one hand, those people can be find new, innovative problems to solve now that (theoretically) the problem their job was working on is now solved.

On the other, most people in those positions aren't really in a position to find and pull resources to solve a new problem. Here in the US, there isn't much of a safety net to support them while they're just trying to put food on the table.

Love the progress of Tesla, but I think there needs to be a solution to the jobs that are going to be made obsolete by reducing the number of suppliers and jobs. Don't know if this is a policy issue or a market issue to solve.

<comment><USER2> The market doesn't care about suppliers and jobs going out of business (actually more cynically the market encourages efficiency, and useless suppliers are inefficient).

Sometimes places try to legislate make-work jobs into existence, using laws to create jobs where none are actually needed. There's famous a milton friedman anecdote:

> Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a > worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, > instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He > asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: > "You don't understand. This is a jobs program." To which Milton replied: > "Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it's jobs you want, then > you should give these workers spoons, not shovels."

\---

Other policies might protect the workers by providing baseline resources (UBI or services), or job retraining. There are all sorts of interesting discussions along these lines.

Similar things have happened in the past, so we do have some idea of the devastation it causes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > The data Tesla collects from users, their environs, interests, tendencies, > travel habits and the range of behaviors will arguably be more valuable than > the engines and high-performance batteries powering them. This enables Tesla > to hone the customer experience, while discerning where the market will veer > next.

I for one, hope the companies focused on making great car hardware win this battle, not the companies that want to turn the car into a giant data harvesting platform.

<comment><USER4> Sadly I don't know if that's possible in this day and age. Every single time there's an opportunity to harvest data it seems companies do it.

<comment><USER5> Volume generally beats quality for models. So the default position of anyone looking to analyze the data will be to ask for more of it.

This is where I think GDPR helps since it adds cost to that data. It really gives you and opportunity to assess the value versus the liability of the data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article compared the market cap of Tesla to Hong Kong's GDP. I stopped reading then.

<comment><USER7> Also, Why do economists give government budget deficits as a percent of gdp instead of Government revenue ? unnecessary indirection...

<comment><USER8> It isn't really indirection in that government can raise taxes, thereby increasing the amount of revenue available to service debt. The government doesn't have as direct influence over GDP, and the impact of government policies on GDP takes longer to be seen. So it makes sense to express debt as a percentage of the figure which is the harder constraint.

<comment><USER7> It's like startups reporting burn rate as a percentage of investor wealth.

Governments already operate mostly near maximum revenue. Raise taxes anymore and Capital and labor walk away.

<comment><USER8> > Governments already operate mostly near maximum revenue. Raise taxes anymore > and Capital and labor walk away.

Look at OECD data on tax revenue as percent of GDP [1]. France is at the top at 46.1%. OECD average is 34.2%. US is near the bottom at 26.8%.

Given the big differences in tax rates, it seems implausible every government is at maximum revenue - that might be true for the highest taxing countries like France and Denmark, but is unlikely to be true for a below-average tax country like the US.

The "Laffer curve" determines maximum government revenue - the point at which raising taxes any further would cause overall government revenue to fall. Nobody knows exactly where that point is, but most experts believe the US is a fair way below it (see e.g. [2])

[1] [https://data.oecd.org/chart/63TM](https://data.oecd.org/chart/63TM)

[2] [https://www.jstor.org/stable/23269968?seq=1](https://www.jstor.org/stable/23269968?seq=1)

<comment><USER7> I wonder if the us numbers are misleadingly low because they may not include state and city taxes. [https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what- breakdown...](https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-breakdown- revenues-among-federal-state-and-local-governments)

<comment><USER8> The OECD website says [1]:

> This indicator relates to government as a whole (all government levels)

"all government levels" means state/provincial/territorial/regional/county/city/town/etc, the whole lot

So I see no evidence it is "misleadingly low", I think the OECD's statistics are generally accurate. (More accurate than the UN's, because the countries whose governments are most likely to commit statistical fraud are not OECD members.)

[1] [https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-revenue.htm](https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax- revenue.htm)

<comment><USER7> Thanks. Agreed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I did some research on EVs for sale here in Australia and found that although they are not the cheapest, Telsa has the best recharging network.

The supercharger stations along the main highways around the country are well worth the extra price of the cars, if you need to go on a trip outside the cities it will make it much nicer.

They also have the best battery thermal management (in the model Y) with its air conditioner able to route warm or chilled coolant wherever it is needed on the fly inside the vehicle. They are the only ones on the market doing this.

As far as I know they are also the only carmaker working on constructing future car models out of huge die casts, which will greatly speed up production and cut costs. This has nothing to do with being electric cars, any car company could have done this already, but didn't?

</comment><comment><USER10> I remain very bullish on Tesla.

Tesla is technically and organizationally ahead of their competitors. The EV market is Tesla's to lose.

Reminds me of Toyota before them. Others could set out to copy everything about Toyota verbatim, and in the 18 months it takes to implement, Toyota will then be 18 months ahead. To get ahead of Toyota, you'd have to leapfrog.

And while the tech will certainly percolate out to others, I can't imagine any existing player successfully adopting Tesla's organizational innovations.

\- Shuffling their org charts, so that octovalve and unibottles are even possible.

\- Implementing new stuff asap, instead of waiting for model years.

\- Aggressively reducing part counts.

\- Toyota style vertical integration, reversing decades of outsourcing.

\- Learning how to write software.

Etc.

Any way. If Elon Musk can avoid imploding, I think competitors will have to seize the future waves of disruption to displace Tesla. Solid state batteries for EV. And people smarter than me are bullish on hydrogen fuel.

<comment><USER11> Some of the core of Tesla's fundamental advantages are their lead in integration of battery technology.

Their battery tech is "good", but that could disappear at any moment with the theoretical advantages of solid state / lithium metal batteries over what is used now.

Their software lead isn't that great however (aside from whatever state their self-driving is in ), that's pretty straightforward software and integration and UI, and really underlines how functionally stupid the incumbent ICE companies are that "over the air update" is magical technology to them.

So Tesla's lead is substantive in the moment, but still very much tenuous.

Many other ICE companies could vertically integrate to match. Every new platform by a company, and EVs generally demand a fundamentally new platform, would be an opportunity to match a great deal of Tesla's vertical integration.

But the mainline ICE makers have been so slow and so stody and so stupid and so corrupt for sooooo long, and that runs far deeper than just the C-suite in their management hierarchies, that they will probably still be asleep at the switch for ten years, despite the fact that nothing besides organizational malaise stops them from changing course.

<comment><USER10> To clarify:

I'm only a casual consumer of geek news, so I hope someone can chime in to correct me.

Whatever the quality of Tesla's software, the key point is they can write software. I've read (heard) that other car mfgs outsource most or all software development.

Random notion:

Your reply reminded of Apple dabbling with automotive stuff and the general befuddlement about that effort.

It now occurs to me that Apple may be sizing up becoming the software stack provider to the car mfgs cannot write their own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's uncertain whether Tesla has won. Less uncertain is that a lot of the existing manufacturers have already lost.

<comment><USER13> I don't understand this sentiment. Do existing manufacturers even see TSLA as a threat? Tesla has about 0.5% of the global market share for autos. Toyota has 275 B revenue and 50 B gross profits Tesla has 24 B revenue and 4 B gross profits Toyota sells ~ 10,7 million vehicles/yr and Tesla sells ~400k

It seems that rise and fall of various large auto manufactures are dictated more by the competition between them, than anything the upstart Tesla is doing.

<comment><USER14> This might be true today, but will it hold in the medium/long-term future? The precise concern is _that_ the existing manufacturers aren't paying attention to the upstart that could conceivably eat their lunch in the medium-term future.

The pivotal question here is whether the existing manufacturers are simply burying their heads in the sand, or are ignoring the growth of EVs due to a principled strategy that has legs. That case has not been made sufficiently clearly, if it even has any merit, in my opinion.

<comment><USER13> My point is that I don't see any reason to believe it won't hold true in the medium/long term future?

Do they have any interest in fighting for the EV market now? Are there barriers to entry that can stop them from leisurely moving in one the technology has wider adoption and maturity?

<comment><USER14> A single data point certainly does not make a trend, but VW has actually tried to compete and had to change their tune rather quickly by admitting that Tesla has a sustainable lead in the EV space.

<comment><USER13> I think that is fair evidence suggesting that tesla can hold its own in the EV space. That said, Im not convinced that this is an existential threat for any of the top manufacturers. If tesla has the entire EV market for the next 10 years, it will become on of the top manufacturers, not eliminate them.

Hell, they could even be synergistic. Tesla charges a consumer premium for clean EVs, sells the credits to auto manufacturers, who get to sell high profit/ low mileage vehicles.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: I've got an idea, but what do I do now? [UK] - <AUTHOR>

This is my first ever Ask HN, so do be gentle!
Anyway, I have an idea that I genuinely believe would translate, given the right kind of TLC, into a viable startup. I don't want to give too much away in this posting for obvious reasons but it's based around non-profit and voluntary organisations, a field I've been working in for around five years.
Basically, it's a web-based solution to a number of problems I've come up against repeatedly and frustratingly in my experience working in the field. It's by no means a half-baked idea; it's something I've been thinking a lot about for a good few months now. I've done quite a bit of research and I can't find anything already extant that would duplicate what I'm doing now. From conversations with colleagues in the field and my own observations, I am genuinely and passionately of the view that it'd stand up on its own two feet as a startup were it to be built.
However, and this is perhaps where I'm likely to lose the HN audience, my technical skills aren't all that. I have a decent and very up-to-date knowledge and understanding of a lot of technical topics (thanks in no small part to HN), I can design websites to a high standard and fit an existing CMS into them and I'm generally a pretty technically-minded person but I've just never had the time to learn to code.
I'm not cheeky enough to come on here and say "can someone join me and code this app I've got an idea for?" because that'd just be daft, but I'd love it if someone would hand me a few pointers as to where I might find like-minded people with whom I could discuss things with a view to a possible collaboration (and even application to YC at some point in the future). My actual skills are more design and copywriting than coding. (I'm a trained journalist, but with the bottom falling out of everything media-wise I've ended up doing something completely different.)
Where I'm based might be a bit of an issue - in the rural UK (Manchester is the closest place with anything meaningful going on). If I was living in Oakland or Palo Alto things might be a little easier in this respect. (And I'd have a nice tan instead of shivering in the office in my woolly jumper).
Thanks in advance for any advice you might like to give. I'll be really grateful for all replies, even if they're "stop dreaming and get back to work"!
By the way, I'm a fairly seasoned HN member (~600 karma) but I generally post under my real name, hence the "cloak". <comment><USER2> I'm based in Manchester, and can code etc. If you'd like to meet up to discuss things I'd be happy to catch up for a hot chocolate or beer sometime. Email me.

Logically you've got 3 choices.

* Learn to code.

* Pay someone to code.

* Partner with someone who can code.

Which you do depends on which you're happiest trading for what you want - time, money, or equity.

There are some networking events in Manchester that may be useful to you - geekup may be of interest.

Are any grants available to pay for the initial coding? I know that there are programmes such as 'Creative Credits' that connects you with universities etc, so this may be a route to go down.</comment>


SETI investigating HD 164595 for alien signal - <AUTHOR> http://www.seti.org/seti-institute/a-seti-signal <comment><USER2> Likely terrestrial origin

[https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=80193](https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=80193)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Somewhat live update of scan. [http://setiquest.info/](http://setiquest.info/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Follow Jon Richards (@jrseti) who runs the observing program at SETI for more.</comment>


Our Flappy Dystopia - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattiebrice.com/our-flappy-dystopia/ <comment><USER2> I thought the introductory statement is ironical, but, apparently, it is not. I don't think this article resounds well within the HN community since it is a "mainstream space" that is being criticized. However, despite its polemic nature, it is a worthwhile read, a representative neo-Marxist critique, that you won't often find on HN.

</comment><comment><USER3> Let us coin a new acronym: IAFG - It's A Frickin' Game.

The problem isn't capitalism. The problem is that people are so wrapped up in first-world problems and distractions from anything meaningful that they actually believe something as trivial as Flappy Birds is worthy of expending any emotion whatsoever.

</comment><comment><USER4> The author makes some important critiques of the video game and video game reporting industries in general, which I readily agree with. Most importantly, the author points out that

 _how our societies are organized by valuing people and things by their monetary value above all else structures how we talk about games_

and

 _The mainstream culture of games development demands you are from a class of people who could go into computer science or digital art training and have enough resources to handle an industry that has a terrible track record with labor issues._

But the application of these ideas to Flappy Bird and Candy Crush misses the mark. From everyone I've heard from, the backlash against these games stemmed from the fact that they are addictive, dull, and not creative; capitalism was not a significant factor.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes. This. The real problem with Flappy Bird is that it made money and got attention without being blessed by curator types who think it shouldn't be popular.

If one of the usual indie darlings had made Flappy Bird, it would be hailed as a "brilliant, hardcore, minimalist free-to-play flying game with ingenously- simple touchscreen control, procedurally generated obstacle courses, and 8-bit-styled graphics that recall the glory days of NES."

I also found it really surprising that the author didn't mention Minecraft, which somehow graduated from being an Infiniminer clone to being an original IP you can sue over. Not coincidentally, today there are only "Minecraft clones".

</comment><comment><USER6> _Dong is considered an outsider. Who is he? From Vietnam? Oh, that explains this 'knock-off' rhetoric people are using._

Ehh....to the extent people are complaining that it looks like Super Mario, they're complaining about infringement upon a Japanese game, so the xenophobia complaint doesn't really hold up. I thought most people hated Flappy Bird because it was difficult, pointless, and so addictive that they had wasted lots of time on it despite the other two flaws.

<comment><USER7> From the article:

 _A quick google image search of Jonathan Blow's Braid can not only reveal that the indie darling also uses green pipes, but also uses analogues, very obvious references, to Mario's enemies, mechanics, and story line._

indie darling

<comment><USER6> What's your point? _Braid_ is a vasly more ambitious concept, with complex puzzles, unusual-yet-intuitive game mechanics, and very elaborate visual design, as opposed to a quickie game like Flappy Bird.

And again, I don't think anyone hates Flappy Bird because it has green pipes, they hate it mainly because it's addictive without really being satisfying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord _Why aren't there more minorities writing about minority issues in a time of heightened social justice on sites that pay fair wages? Because someone wants to make money. Why are the weird free games made commonly by minority artists that play a huge role in changing how we think of the medium excluded from news coverage and conference talks? Because someone wants to make money._

There are? In fact, there's more now than ever, especially with the popularity of postmodernism in a large variety of media publications.

Now, I agree with you on "weird free games" that are excluded from mainstream attention. They're not profitable. But then again, being countercultural has never been profitable. What's more: most people don't want to play art games and minimalistic, philosophically motivated indie productions. They want the next multiplayer Call of Duty game. It's a sad reality, but it is what it is.

I have to ask you, however... why are you specifically referring to _minority_ artists? Minority in the sense of intellectual disposition, or in the sense of demographics? If it's the latter, then minority game developers are very rare to begin with. That's not really a fault of institutions not giving them attention.

You also imply that all art games or games developed by minorities _deserve_ attention. This is not the case. I consider myself to be open-minded when it comes to a good art game with a message, but there's tons of underproduced crap that masquerades under the banner of art to make up for its mediocrity.

 _It doesn't sound nice when it's constantly called out, does it? Because it isn't. There is a price tag to participating in games. The mainstream culture of games development demands you are from a class of people who could go into computer science or digital art training and have enough resources to handle an industry that has a terrible track record with labor issues. The standard success story of someone in the games media is a person who can afford to keep up with the newest products and has the resources to write for free or low- wage for about two years. Important conferences, even when you're invited to speak, often cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars to attend._

This is all true. Crunch time and low wages are notorious.

 _The idea of success outside the conventional method of capitalism, which is intersectional in its effects, is met with contempt._

This is obviously true for AAA companies who want to keep their hegemony, but I honestly doubt most people are hostile to unconventional business models for indie games. Quite the contrary, such endeavors are becoming more popular and people are getting more receptive to them. I'd blame contempt on a lack of imagination more than anything.

 _The conversation of what is and isn't a game is often, intentionally or not, used to assign value to already established gaming conventions that benefit the established system and marginalize works that do not look like it, and therefore threaten it. Mobile games are often slated as 'casual' games, which people in the gaming press and development overall side-eye as a genre of games mostly just looking to grab people's money._

Except casual games _are_ a legitimate distinction. This also includes their business model. As for people berating hardcores versus casuals, that's largely an in-joke.

 _Except, well, that's ALL of AAA games, such as the hype around how much Grand Theft Auto V made despite that it was profiting off of flagrant sexism and racism._

Uh... GTA V may not exactly be the most social justice-friendly game out there, but it portrays the grisly aspects of the real world as they are.

 _Dong is considered an outsider. Who is he? From Vietnam? Oh, that explains this 'knock-off' rhetoric people are using._

 _It's because the gaming community set up a success narrative for certain indie, mostly white, mostly men, mostly from English-speaking countries, developers who strive to make smaller games competitive with the big dogs._

And here we go, people... the reason there was a backlash against Flappy Bird was because the developer was Vietnamese! IT WAS ALL RACISM!

Hate to break it to you, but Flappy Bird was a painfully generic and dead simple Helicopter clone with graphics that imitated (not saying stolen from, but imitated) Super Mario Bros. People were mostly baffled at the insane success of such a, quite frankly, stupid game.

 _Because of social justice activism and outside pressure from a society that sees gaming as grotesque, awareness about how exclusionary games are is at critical mass and the industry is scrambling to answer. It has no fucking clue how to market to and include minority members of their community and in the world at large. So when Farmville, Peggle, Candy Crush Saga, and Flappy Bird appeal to this mysterious audience big budget and scrappy indies can't seem to tap, it's foul play._

I can't believe this author is legitimately defending games like Farmville and Candy Crush, which are deliberately designed to be highly addictive, while having a highly grinding gameplay and then carelessly exploiting its players down to the last penny. All this coming from an anti-capitalist, too.

But that's how the gaming industry works. Like any other industry, it exists to make a profit. The gaming community isn't some misogynistic wasteland of sexism and racism. If you can even claim there's one coherent gaming "community", that is. There's plenty of subcultures separated from each other. The main problem with gaming is the immaturity of its audience.

Ultimately, more social justice drivel. Can't have enough of it on HN, I guess.

<comment><USER8> > As for people berating hardcores versus casuals, that's largely an in-joke.

I am under the impression that a sizable group of people on the internet regularly gets legitimately angry about any given video game issue. Why would this be different? I remember people being genuinely upset with Nintendo's "betrayal of its fans" with the Wii.

<comment><USER9> The Flappy Bird dev was getting death/suicide threats on Twitter after he announced he was taking it down. [https://twitter.com/EliLanger/timelines/432588181611892736](https://twitter.com/EliLanger/timelines/432588181611892736)

I hope these people aren't the majority, but there are a lot of people who are abusive about games that don't measure up to their definition of a 'game'. It's unfortunate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't mean to go off topic here, but what is it with postings on HN that have blatant typos in the first sentence? I think this is the third time today I've seen it, and it's starting to make me paranoid. Is this some kind of sick game?

<comment><USER6> Proofreading is a form of oppression, or so I'm told whenever I venture to critique its absence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hopefully this flappy birds fiasco is the dumbest thing that hits critical mass this year because I can't imagine anything possibly being dumber.</comment>


Alex St. John – Enslaving the Masses - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2016/04/18/recruiting-giants-2/ <comment><AUTHOR> Pls note that sharing is not endorsement. Just thought it was newsworthy.</comment>


Protect your computer against cats ... - <AUTHOR> http://www.bitboost.com/pawsense/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is response to the comment in the HN item

        "Ask HN: How to make something awesome out of Motion Detection"

(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=423865>)

in which someone said that they wanted an auto nuke launcher to take out the cat when it walked on the keyboard.

<comment><USER2> The sound samples are way more amusing than a launcher: [http://www.bitboost.com/pawsense/example-of-sounds-that- anno...](http://www.bitboost.com/pawsense/example-of-sounds-that-annoy- cats.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is this a real product?

<comment><AUTHOR> I only know as much as is there - it's not mine, I just remembered seeing it and thought it was cool.</comment></comment>


Show HN: one day project, get better bug reports from customers / clients - <AUTHOR> http://goodbugreport.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This idea was inspired by Jeff Casimir's talk at Rocky Mountain Ruby Conference, he basically said it is hard to get a good bug report from a client, then outlined a framework for them to follow. I put this framework into a simple form for people to use.</comment>


Ask HN: I want to detect when arbitrary things come into a video stream - <AUTHOR>

I have seen some javascript implementations of 'object detectors' but they all seem to be limited to just faces or hands or some specific type of gesture.
Is there anyway I can just show "it" say.. some little statue I made when I was a kid and have "it" tell me if it's in an video?  I want to basically: have a video stream loaded (for example, the webcam on my laptop) and then, if some _thing_ that I have predefined comes into the video, then do something with it.. basically make an HTTP call to some other service I have written.
Is there any "it" that can help me do this? <comment><USER2> What you are looking for is an "object recognition" algorithm. These algorithms take one or multiple images of an object (e.g. your little statue) and then try to locate it in another image.

Generally, they are computationally expensive, so performing them on a video stream, especially inside the browser, will most likely not work, even for rather low resolutions.

I have some experience with the SIFT algorithm. Takes some time to grok it as the algorithm consists of several sub-steps.

You may want to look into OpenCV, they have a couple of algorithms implemented.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would imagine it would be pretty slow, but you could have a video stream write to a canvas element at regular intervals. You could analyze the pixels in the canvas to look for a pattern. This would be the hard part, since you'd have to write an engine to detect edges and create a hash of all detectable objects in the frame, then you'd have to match each hash to a known hash of the desired object. To get the known hash, you'd likely have to feed in many example images of your object and create hashes from these.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, what you describe is extremely difficult to do, and people have been trying to do with for decades now without success.

It could work if you place yourself into similar conditions over all the videos. By having a good understanding (precise model) of what you want to recognize, you could make some pattern recognition / object detection to be able to find it in other videos. But the huge problem in this field is that the conditions keep changing. Light, luminosity, color, shape, distance. All of the makes pretty much every method of recognition of "it" completely useless.

There is one thing you can currently do though. It is target tracking. Without knowing the target before, and with minimal user interaction to follow it, it is currently possible to track it quite accurately.

Hope this helps.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've seen people do this with a Kinect I think. Obviously that's more info than just a video stream but I don't know exactly what your limits on your solution are.

</comment><comment><USER6> Are you restricted to running in the browser?

<comment><AUTHOR> not necessarily, but preferably

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> i'm no expert, but i believe machine learning / classification algorithms can help you on this. you just need to train the algorithms on what you want to find.

'finding' objects means feeding the algorithms a series of 'features' that you extract from video and normalize into data structures - color, corners, edges, velocities, relative distances, etc, which are then fed into the algorithms to produce a classification or a probability.

analyze every Nth frame and try to classify found objects. if a known object is found, do something.</comment>


Hiding Negative Information May Seem More Untrustworthy Than Revealing It - <AUTHOR> http://harvardmagazine.com/2015/08/the-company-we-keep

<comment><USER2> The title seems a little misleading. The study seems to explore the social impact of explicitly _declining to answer_ questions, which is very different from _not volunteering_ something. If I'm telling someone about my work history, the social implications of leaving out that summer I swept freight docks is different from telling them I'd rather not talk about the summer in question given that they've asked.

In the former case, there's no attention placed on that summer, and people (probably rightly) assume that nothing interesting happened (it may come up in an interview why there's a gap there, but I'll get to what I think the parallel for that is). In the latter case, I'm being relatively uncooperative in the information-gathering process.

The connection to companies seems weak to me. When I go into a restaurant that neglects to post its food hygiene scores, I assume roughly the same as when I walk into a store and the cashier neglects to tell me if he has a criminal history. If I ask, and the restaurant tells me that it declines to answer, _that_ seems more parallel to the question of declining to answer negative personal information. Similarly with the "decline to answer" case among people, I bet people would infer the worst of companies that "actively" declined to answer questions (versus those that neglected to bring it up).

These are interesting questions the researcher is asking, and it's particularly interesting to think about how we craft our identities online, but I think they need to reflect more on the parallels they draw before concluding that dynamics are different.

edit: I'm looking up the paper itself, because it occurs to me that a mainstream news outlet is pretty likely to misreport the study's design, results, discussion, etc... and it'd be unfair not to assume that the article writer (or I the reader) misunderstood something.

<comment><USER3> > I'm looking up the paper itself, because it occurs to me that a mainstream > news outlet is pretty likely to misreport the study's design, results, > discussion, etc... and it'd be unfair not to assume that the article writer > (or I the reader) misunderstood something.

I really wish we could convince science journalists that giving a proper citation of any new study they cite is an absolute requirement for meaningful coverage. And for web journalists, there should absolutely always be a link to it if it is in any way available online, no excuses permitted.

<comment><USER4> Well, it is cited by title and authors, and a googling of the title and lead author returns a full copy PDF as the first two results:

[https://www.google.de/search?q=What+Hiding+Reveals+leslie+jo...](https://www.google.de/search?q=What+Hiding+Reveals+leslie+john&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=fbfNVYinJ5Ky7Qbw56igBg)

Agreed that a link should have been there, but it was effectively cited, if not MLA/APA.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough, but I do think we have to convince them that there just aren't any excuses for linking not it if that's possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Therefore, you should only continue to withhold the information if you think they've underestimated how bad it is.

Therefore, if you continue to withhold the information they should increase their estimate of how bad it is.</comment>


Japan adopts negative interest rate in surprise move - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35436187 <comment><USER2> Well, some bank are using "negative" interest for years. Its called "the annual fee".

<comment><USER3> and with a low enough balance it can reach -100%</comment></comment>


Musicslu's "name your own price" music distribution system - <AUTHOR> http://musicslu.com/we-are-artists <comment><AUTHOR> The basics of Musicslu:

How does a community purchase work?

1\. The artists of We Are Artists lists a total amount they would like to sell their release for, in this case $1,500.

2\. You name your own price, using the "Make a pledge" button above, and offer the amount you would help purchase We Are Artists for.

3\. If the total $1,500 is raised before Nov 27, 2009, the pledges are given to the musicians and the album is released under the Creative Commons license as a download for free sharing.

4\. If the entire $1,500 is not reached, all pledges are discarded, and everyone walks away like nothing happened. The music is not released under Creative Commons and you pay nothing.

\--

Musicslu is an attempt to address the problems with pirating music. If some music pirates could take a few steps out of their trenches, and some artists take a few steps out of theirs too, this could work.

"A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom."[<http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html> , listed at #1] If not the cure, at least a solid attempt.

</comment><comment><USER2> I know I'm going to be slammed with downvotes, but I don't care, $1500 is a pathetic price for a CD. I think the concept has some cool potential, but an artist can't possibly survive on $1500 per album. And why the hell are there artists on here which are already on record labels that are clearly not going along with this and what the hell does "pending approval" mean. I'm sorry, but if you want this to work, it's going to have to be reasonable for artists, not deceive people into thinking music is there that isn't, and make a heck of a lot more sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not $1500 per album, it's however much the artist chooses. In this case, a bunch of artists from reddit.com got together and decided to make a mix tape and split the $1500. They are all relatively unknown artists who would like some exposure.

If another artist came and set the price at $10,000, then he'd receive 10k.

The albums on the front page pending approval are just that, artists that have been contacted. Without those placeholders, the site would be rather empty. It's no different than how reddit supposedly started as very few people with multiple accounts pretending to be very many people.

<comment><USER2> Placeholders are shit. I'd greatly prefer an empty and honest site. And it IS different from reddit if those accounts actually contributed something. One Republic? Are you serious? Do you think there's a snowball's chance in hell of getting One Republic on that site? It's a trick. These placeholder accounts are contributing absolutely nothing and never will.

On the issue of money, I see what you're saying, but the site seems to suggest that $1500 is a reasonable price one might see on here. $10k is barely reasonable when you consider that most artists make one CD every 2 years or so. Not that most artists GET $10k, but it's still pathetic. I'd like to see some consideration too for the fact that artists get a pathetic amount of money for their work. The notion of a starving artist is insane in a world that is so obsessed with entertainment.

I don't mean to sound angry. I'm just frustrated. I think there is a lot of potential here.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry, I must be explaining this incredibly bad. It's not $1500 or $10,000, it's whatever the artist chooses. This isn't only for Jay Z or the Kings of Leon, there are thousands upon thousands of artists out there that don't have record deals or world-wide tours.

"I'd like to see some consideration too for the fact that artists get a pathetic amount of money for their work."

I couldn't agree more, this is why musicslu.com was created.

<comment><USER2> You're explaining it fine, but when I see prices that aren't even in the right order of magnitude, it makes me wonder. A reasonable price for a high-quality CD is over $100k. For a billboard-top-100-quality CD, over $500k. For a Jay Z CD, over $1m easy.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


IBM's infamous "Black Team" - <AUTHOR> http://www.t3.org/tangledwebs/07/tw0706.html# <comment><USER2> Does anyone have a link to the version where the Black Team member found a bug in rigourously (mathematically) proven code? edit Ah, here it is: <http://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheBlackTeam.html>

<comment><USER3> It's a law of nature that you can build up a lot of energy in something by adding just a _tiny_ bit of energy each pass. This was a bitter team that was beaten and decided to use physics to add this tiny bit of energy each time the tape rewound--mind you, at a steady rate _chosen_ to add in the energy perfectly-- to embarrass somebody who had beaten them.

Or is my understanding of a tape drive incorrect, and they would wind and unwind at a set rate? Because the original article said that it would often stop, rewind, move forward to retrieve data.

<comment><USER4> On the other hand any physical system in motion is also loosing energy constantly to friction, air resistance, and other factors. Because of that and because the winding/unwinding description seemed implausible I strongly suspect the story is apocryphal.

<comment><USER5> Sorry to nitpick, but I think this is a good thing to know. Apocryphal means "of doubtful authenticity", not mythical or false, which is the how you seem to be using it. The story is clearly apocryphal.

<comment><USER4> No need to be sorry, I'll know to use it correctly in the future. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Searching for "the black team ibm -mustaches -infamous" on google returns (nearly) nothing. I find it astonishing that there is no record of such a team that doesn't mention mustache twirling.

I suspect that some hacker wanted a version of the Black Watch to look up to, so he invented one. I don't object to the invention of legends, but we should include some traditional legend-flagging phrases: "long ago", "never heard from again", &c.

<comment><USER7> If these events didn't actually transpire the way that the author of this story suggests, does that make the story any less valid?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Having worked on both the hardware and the software for most of IBM's tape drives, from the '60s era 2400s through the '70s 3480s, which cover the time of the Black Team, I find this story difficult to believe. On all these drives adjusting the start/stop mechanism required the engineer to be inside the enclosure with hands on the the very read head area whilst running many patterns of start/stop/rewind/fast forward. If I had felt any significant enclosure movement it would have indicated to me a major problem.

</comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of the article about the developers and testers who worked on software for the shuttle. In all the years, they only had 6 bugs ever reported on the shuttle, all of which were fairly minor as I recall.

It's so true that bugs are now simply part of life, and it has to do with the speed at which development must happen. I wonder what the Black team of old would think of today's web development wild west sort of approach.

Here it is: <http://www.fastcompany.com/node/28121/print> \- They Write the Right Stuff (2007)

</comment><comment><USER10> Reading this story makes me sad.

There's also another story (google fails me) about a legendary IBM programmer around whom IBM built an entire team of testers, documenters, etc, all to keep this one guy's way above average productivity going. That story also makes me sad.

These stories make me sad because I know how huge a difference the environment makes to everyone's job.

The key points about the black team:

1\. A few individuals that happen to be a bit above average at finding defects.

2\. Bring them together, create a team.

3\. Support them, but mostly just get out of their way and don't distract them with management B.S.

Very little change and support results in a huge jump in their productivity!

Same thing with the single legendary programmers, simply relive him of non- programming tedious tasks, give him enough support staff to keep up with his output and again HUGE productivity boost.

What's so sad about this is that is so rarely happens. I think most people are capable of having this productivity jump, if only they'd get the same support. OK, let me back of a bit from most and be more precise and say, you should be at least a bit above average.

But why does this so rarely happen? Sadly I think for most sizable companies minor process changes are a huge obstacle.

The bright side of this? Startups. Startups are like these kinds of teams within a behemoth like IBM, except without the behemoth. Or actually a startup up ought to be like that, because that is one of the key advantages a small business should have over the big ones.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am thinking that this might just be humbug. Possibly motivational humbug, however.

But I did witness first hand some shenanigans done by the Field Engineers on XDS tape drives in the 1970s. They did use a kind of resonant thing to test the limits of how well a particular tape drive was working. It would do a lot of rewinding, stopping, reversing and the like. These drives had long vacuum (work with me here) chambers, one on each side where a loop of tape would be suspended. Thus, a fast back-and-forth operation could be performed on a short section of the tape without moving the reel. The goal was to try to get the tape moving in such a way that it would pop out of the vacuum chamber and fault the tape drive.

Somewhat like the Black Team's efforts are alleged to do, the net result was that all the tape drives, after adjustment, were able to pass this tough diagnostic.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know what became of the Black Team? Presumably it's a defunct group, but when did that happen, and under what context?

</comment><comment><USER13> Lots more comments on the previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=985965> as well as <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994358>

</comment><comment><USER14> As a hardware tester at IBM, this makes me happy. I never see any adoration. People think of it as a 9-5; not as a chance to "best" somebody.

</comment><comment><USER15> I remember hearing about the Black team from a training manual given to new hires who worked at Sperry/Univac in the late 70's - early 80's. There was a passage where the Black Team considered it a "failure" when they couldn't identify a defect during a testing round. And conversely they considered it a "success" when they identified a problem. Its almost as if they were doing TDD before anyone knew what to call it.

<comment><USER16> Ruthless and thorough QA is a good thing, but has nothing to do with TDD. TDD should in theory help prevent the developer from ever hearing from the Black Team to begin with. If the Black Team found the bug, the dev's TDD fu wasn't strong enough.

<comment><USER17> As much as I appreciate your praise of TDD here, there are large categories of defects that TDD does nothing to prevent. TDD only helps programmers write the code they intended to write. It doesn't protect against programmer misunderstandings.

As a result, well-TDD'd code may still have defects that involve:

\- the programmers misunderstood what needed to be built ("requirements" defect) \- the programmers interfaced with an external system that behaves differently than they thought \- the programmers used a third-party library or framework incorrectly \- there is a systemic error in the programmers' approach to the problem (e.g., not knowing about SQL injection attacks)

As I say in my "Let's Play TDD" series (<http://jamesshore.com/Blog/Lets- Play/>), TDD does a great job of helping a programmer write the code she intended to write. But it can't check the programmer's fundamental assumptions, so it's still important to check those assumptions using other techniques.

<comment><USER16> Agree with all of this, and I've made the same arguments myself. That's one reason code coverage metrics are of limited use -- they can't measure the quality of the tests.

I wasn't intending to diminish the role of QA (essential) or assert that TDD cures all (doesn't), just that The Black Team weren't doing TDD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nice article. This "Black Team" is sighted as an example in the book 'Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams'.

<comment><USER19> FYI, "sighted" -> "cited".

Indeed, this story is in Peopleware, and it surprises me that I can find no account of the Black Team which has any details other than those I can find in Peopleware. It makes me wonder whether the story is apocryphal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It would be nice if there was info about the methods they developed for testing, rather than just how effective it was.

</comment><comment><USER21> Pity the websites text takes up only 20% the width of my monitor... text looks cramped and awkward to read while 80% of my monitor is blank white space...

<comment><USER22> Longer line lengths are harder on the eyes. There's a reason why newspapers and magazines use columns.

<comment><USER23> I'm a big believer in columns. See the recent redesign of <http://hackerstream.com> (clicking on stories or users creates new streams/columns), and my previous project, <http://readwarp.com>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> All throughout reading about the Black Team, i couldn't help but recall the Stanford Prison experiment(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment>) and how the article says a lot about how people behave in groups ... Hmm....odd,given the goal of the article..

</comment><comment><USER25> If anyone doubts whether they should read this article, let me quote:

"Team members began to affect loud maniacal laughter whenever they discovered software defects. Some individuals even grew long mustaches which they would twirl with melodramatic flair as they savaged a programmer's code."</comment>


Offshoring shrinks number of IT jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9225376/Offshoring_shrinks_number_of_IT_jobs_study_says_?source=rss_latest_content&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+computerworld%2Fnews%2Ffeed+%28Latest+from+Computerworld%29 <comment><USER2> I wish these 'More Jobs Are Moving Offshore' stories would accurately describe what non-trivial positions are affected. We now know it's possible to move call-centers offshore, despite actual consumer satisfaction, since it's been condensed to a mechanical process of reading a script and transferring departments when the script has been exhausted. As close to trivial of a business process you'll get. Anything more complex and we're talking a whole different world.

After hiring a few developers and designers from oDesk, I've concluded for myself that it's more expensive in the long run. Not only do you need to take the time to be ridiculously specific with your implementation (add time here), you need to check their code to ensure it's at all maintainable (more time), and clean up when necessary (add more time). At the end of the day, it has cost me a lot more in time. You could strike it rich by finding the right person, but it's good of odds as winning a mini lottery.

If the small scale of oDesk is any indicator of performance for larger projects, outsourcing will not be taking off any time soon for jobs requiring above trivial knowledge. If we have naive CIO's who still believe how outsourcing anything above junior/trivial positions can help the bottom line, we're in trouble. Either way, I've come to greatly appreciate even the junior/intermediate developers I work with locally.

</comment><comment><USER3> Has anyone had any success with off shoring development jobs? At a large software company that I worked at, we worked with an Indian team, and I found that they were nothing but trouble. They would miss deadlines (with nothing but reassurances that everything was on track up until the day that we were supposed to release), and the code that they produced was both incredibly buggy and had poor code quality. Now, I probably cost the company 10x what they did, but still, I feel like it was a bad expense to offshore. They ended up creating a lot of work and resulted in lower quality products. Alas, software development is one field where it's easy to have very negative productivity. That said, this is only a single experience, so this may have been bad luck.

<comment><USER4> Yes this is the common theme of outsourcing to other cultures, it has to do with cultural norms and everyday knowledge that we take for granted, the same thing would happen if you took the best American developers and assembled a team and then outsourced them to an Indian company to build software for an Indian market. You in the end have to write the software twice to get it developed offshore, once in a sudocode of diagrams and detailed functional specs and the second time in code by the outsourced team. The end result is that it saves very little and increase the risk of failure. The take away is that it is a bad bet unless you know what you are doing and are doing at a very large scale, for the majority of US companies it is not a good idea. Many are starting to realize this and bringing projects home, which is why I find this article to be suspect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't this article about 10 years late?</comment>


Jailbreaking not a requirement for infecting iPhones with Hacking Team spyware - <AUTHOR> https://blog.lookout.com/blog/2015/07/10/hacking-team/

<comment><USER2> So, apparently they created an app with an enterprise certificate that has a transparent icon in the newsstand app.

The enterprise certificate (now revoked) bypasses the App Store review, as is well understood.

However, the app still needs permissions. It asks for permissions. So, if I'm reading correctly, it would require physical access to activate.

Not quite as scary as the title would show. I'd say "install" rather than "infect" because there seemingly, unless I missed something (which it's possible I did) there's _no actual exploit involved_.

If you let someone else run software on your device, and allow them to grant permissions, then obviously they can steal your data. The only reasons that make this notable are the enterprise certificate and transparent icon. (And of course the source)

So read the article, but the title is a tad misleading.

EDIT: Thinking about it some more, I should point out that the article is fairly well written. Also, we consider computer spyware that doesn't use an exploit an "infection", so I guess it's valid, but still misleading. Great and informative article though.</comment>


What is the true price of Rwanda's recovery? - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8593734.stm

<comment><USER2> I am a part owner of a business in West Africa, and I'll say that I'm an enthusiastic supporter of Kagame's leadership and hope to see similar leaders rise in Africa.

The West and this documentary makes the erroneous assumption that full democracy and unfettered freedom of speech are axiomatic components of a society. Not so. I see these as goals to aspire to, not starting points.

Singapore's rise from one of the poorest countries in Asia to now being wealthier than Britain on a per capita basis was not founded in full democracy. Even Europe had to go through a long evolution from the autocratic Roman Empire, to monarchies, to feudalism, aristocracies, and eventually democracy trickled in.

If what Kagame is doing is working, then let it work for his people, The country is now peaceful and has an inviting and reponsible environment for private enterprise to play a role in developing the country. The west needs to stop trying to fit square pegs into round holes.

<comment><USER3> I cannot agree with you more.

Rule of law and stable government are necessary to create an environment in which the economy can develop and circumstances for the people improve.

Democracy in an ethnically heterogeneous country does not make this easier, not when the ethnicities in question have simmering feuds and vendettas.

That the US became somewhat ethnically diverse after a stable core was established does not change the fact that African countries have a substantially more difficult task ahead of them in trying to establish governmental and legal frameworks in the midst of competing tribalist agendas.

So, if it works for Rwanda, leave well enough alone.

Results are what matter in Africa right now, not whether a country complies 100% with a Western definition of democracy while citizens are starving in droves.

The first human right is the right to life, and at least some form of security. Free speech comes significantly later.

Democracies in the West work (somewhat) because of shared values established over centuries. Policies of one particular political party compared to another are differences in degree, the parties do not question the underlying foundations of the nation, and one party getting voted into power is hardly the beginning of a purge or dictatorship.

You cannot expect a full-fledged, functioning democracy to grow overnight when not a decade ago people were being killed in their thousands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interestingly, I just met a well-educated Rwandan expat yesterday evening. Expat out of necessity as much or more so than choice. He's sure that if he returned, he would be killed.

I don't have other sources to back this up, but he described the continuing situation of very large numbers of refugees living, often "in the forests", in neighboring countries. As the violence subsided, other populations from neighboring countries flowed in to take advantage of the resulting vacancy, and they now control the government. There is a strong Western (e.g. U.S.) presence, but in his opinion it is there for the purpose of facilitating resource extraction from neighboring countries, e.g. the Congo.

I hope to learn more about this; I'm merely repeating here what was said. He may have his own biases, but I know him through friends whom I know pretty well and trust, and what he said leaves me with the impression that Western news sources are providing much less than the full story.

<comment><USER4> Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ et al.) has a daily hour-long world news show, "Worldview". It specialized in interviewing experts and specialists on topics both big and small. The listener receives MUCH more information, both in detail and in expertise, than is available through much of the (U.S.) mainstream media.

Today, the second "half" (more or less) of the show discussed the situation in Rwanda. Much of the information appears to be similar to what I heard the other month and described in my parent comment, above.

Worldview archive page for the program:

<http://www.wbez.org/Program_WV.aspx?episode=41595>

Worldview page for the particular segment:

<http://www.wbez.org/Program_WV_Segment.aspx?segmentID=41596>

Worldview podcast page (note that MP3's that have fallen off the podcast listing due to age are still available through the site's archive pages)

<http://podcasts.chicagopublicradio.org/cprworldviewpodcast>

I wasn't monitoring the clock exactly, but I think the segment will begin somewhere between minutes 20 and 25 of the podcast (probably around minute 23). If the podcast includes the lead in BBC news summary, add 6 or 7 minutes to my guestimate start time for the segment.</comment></comment>


A Python Puzzle (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://akaptur.com/blog/2013/10/29/a-python-puzzle/ <comment><USER2> One of the undocumented oddities of the peephole optimizer is that it will try to merge duplicate constants. When combined with integer (non-)interning, this lets me do:

      >>> a = 300
      >>> b = 300
      >>> print(a is b)
      False
      >>> a = 300; b = 300; print(a is b)
      True
      >>> def my_function():
      ...   a = 300
      ...   b = 300
      ...   print(a is b)
      ...
      >>> my_function()
      True

... and I see in the followup posting (this puzzle is from 213) that that was the desired answer, and that it was further analyzed in various ways, and improved upon.

<comment><USER3> Pretty cool. I was thinking about some scoping issue. (Python scoping is very crusty.)</comment></comment>


Relaunchd: a portable clone of launchd - vezzy-fnord https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2015-November/048606.html <comment><AUTHOR> I use FreeBSD and I would love this.</comment>