Linux Foundation Introduces a Telemetry Policy for All Projects - <AUTHOR> https://thenewstack.io/linux-foundation-introduces-a-telemetry-policy-for-all-projects/ <comment><USER2> I've been viewing the Linux Foundation in an increasingly unfavorable light over the past couple of years, so I want to take this opportunity to say something positive about them: this looks like a significantly positive things, and kudos to them for doing it!</comment>


Guardian pulling the plug? - <AUTHOR> http://gojko.net/2010/07/21/guardian-pulling-the-plug/

<comment><USER2> Misleading article title, the Guardian is considering outsourcing some of their IT operations.

Only relevant 'pulling the plug' quote:

      "A common thread here is that DDD, clouds, agile apparently gave better service more efficiently and produced more business value for the same investment. If the Guardian News Media board is now thinking of pulling the plug on all that, then that is seriously casting a shadow on those claims."

<comment><USER3> The problem is, it's very immediate and short term to see a saving from outsourcing now, while the pitfalls that it could potentially create could take years before they get to the point where it because clear that outsourcing was a bad idea.</comment></comment>


Can i Submit a story about myself? - <AUTHOR>

It might be a dumb question to ask. Anyways i am new to this community.<p>Can i submit a story about myself? <comment><USER2> Some minutes ago I submitted the question: What do you do when you get bored, and the HN team delete it, so perhaps you can submit your story but the reviewers can delete it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes.</comment>


React v16.9.0 and the Roadmap Update - <AUTHOR> https://reactjs.org/blog/2019/08/08/react-v16.9.0.html <comment><USER2> Saw this today when I was updating eslint dependencies on a repository. I prepended all the lifecycle methods for the time being which caused errors with `eslint-config-standard`'s camelcase rule. Had to add the following to our `.estlintrc` file:

"camelcase": ["error", { "allow": ["^UNSAFE_"], //regex syntax }]</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best (crowdsourced) content filtering service? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on an educational project which involves users taking photos and uploading to our servers. They can then browse the site, looking at other photos. Since we anticipate people of all ages using our site, we need to filter the images for offensive or off-topic images.
What's the best service to use for this? We need there to be an API, and using crowd-sourcing rather than automatic algorithms (because of higher accuracy).
I'm looking at crowdsifter.com and socialmod.com but have no idea which is better or if there are other better options. Does anyone have any experience with these or other similar services? I'd prefer not having to write an mturk tool myself... <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable links:

<http://crowdsifter.com>

<http://socialmod.com></comment>


Polygonal Map Generation for Games - <AUTHOR> http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/polygon-map-generation/

<comment><USER2> Amit's articles are an awesome gamedev resource that get reposted from time to time (with good reason). Bookmark is recommended, the canonical link is:

[http://www.redblobgames.com/](http://www.redblobgames.com/)

Example of other topics of interest there: Hex Grid implementations, Why piecewise circles are better than bezier curves in generating curved roads, and a 2D visibility algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER3> Please note this from 2010.

A very nice article nonetheless.

<comment><USER4> To me it's definitely _still_ one of the better approaches for believable landscape/island generation and forms the basis to what I'd call a damn-near perfect solution[1].

[1]: [http://experilous.com/1/blog/post/procedural-planet- generati...](http://experilous.com/1/blog/post/procedural-planet-generation)</comment></comment>


14-year-old creates eco-battery - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/20/creativity/teen-macgyver-invents-battery-to-save-the-planet <comment><USER2> This battery doesn't generate energy from carbon dioxide, it generates energy from silver plated guitar wire and aluminum foil. It is probable that like in most batteries the electrolyte (and therefore the CO2) isn't even being consumed.

Now, by no means is there anything wrong with experimenting with silly inventions, and I am sure he learned a lot from this, but it does kind of confuse me that he was awarded $25,000! 3M employs hundreds of chemists. Couldn't the judges just ask for someone to explain the winning entry to them?

<comment><USER3> Confused? I'll explain: 3M paid this kid $25000 in order to generate clickbait headlines and get people the world over to see the mark '3M' with minimal effort and expense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is just a praise article, good for him and other 15y/o out there aspiring to do fun stuff but not really HN discussion material.

There's very little specifics in the article like how much power does it generates, how much CO or whatever it uses etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's a lot of haters here.

Yeah, a kid learned about how batteries work, and how to make one using cheap ingredients. That's pretty cool.

And now, thanks to 3M, has $25k to his name. He can learn a hell of a lot on that. It all depends how he uses it.

One battwery tech I really appreciate is NiFe batteries. The electrolyte is KOH, which one can readily distill from wood ash. The batteries can be severely abused (over/under charged), and will run for decades. All you need is one more water and KOH. The big problem is their energy density is 1/2 that of a lead-acid battery per equal volume.

</comment><comment><USER6> Well, in the US, he can save that $25k and be able to afford maybe 1 year of University + living expenses.

<comment><USER7> Only if he goes to a public school. Lots of private schools in the US cost more than $25000 in tuition per year alone.

I'm a huge fan of the public school system but I live in NY where the quality is generally regarded as decent (often very good even). I'm not so sure in other states. For instance, I'd imagine, although I haven't researched this, that Florida with its low taxes and general disregard for their education system in general probably wouldn't have the best public universities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "14-year-old creates eco-battery with aluminum foil, old guitar strings, and club soda."

Because aluminum foil, old guitar strings and club soda are so prominent in 3rd world countries.

And also... How come I didn't win 25K for my 6th grade science fair projects?

<comment><USER9> This is only a stepping stone. He's working on a plastic-wrap, sitar string, and mango lassi battery.</comment></comment>


Show HN: How Zalando's Mobile engineers support 14M customers - <AUTHOR> http://tech.zalando.com/posts/mobile-engineering-at-zalando.html

<comment><USER2> Short but packed with real examples of what works for your release cycle and feature management. Interesting that you've switched from Crashlytics to New Relic.

Curious what size group this works well for -- how many are on your iOS team?</comment>


Apple macOS Sierra beta no longer allows unsigned apps to run - <AUTHOR> http://netkas.org/?p=1443 <comment><AUTHOR> Apple has removed the option to allow unsigned apps to run from the macOS sierra beta.

Perhaps you think this isn't a big deal. You're wrong. If Apple doesn't change this by the time of the release of the OS, OS X 10.11 will be the last one I use.

Recommended reading/watching:

There is a war coming: Cory Doctorow on the future regulation of general purpose computation – video

[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2012/apr/19/c...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2012/apr/19/cory- doctorow-regulation-computation-video)

Curated computing is no substitute for the personal and handmade

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jul/27/curated-c...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jul/27/curated- computing-environment-apps-choice)

<comment><USER2> I bet they'll still allow it, judging by the implications it would have. But that's my personal bet.

But, You can still open apps by right clicking and pressing Option (Alt) + "Open" menu item. It'll run and be approved going forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow. That's huge. I hope it's only for the beta, although I don't see any logic behind adding it back for the public release ( in terms of beta testing ).

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think the title is true. It is just an UX thing and I believe an improvement.

After an attempt to run an unsigned app, it will appear explicitly listed on that dialog and you can click a button to explicitly allow it. So instead of allowing all apps from "anywhere", you allow them on one by one basis.

At least this is what happened to me with one unsigned app (after installing 10.12 DP on a clean partition).

</comment><comment><USER5> So things like Homebrew will no longer work?? Wow, if true that's a serious issue.

<comment><USER6> Codesigning is only a requirement for app bundles (i.e. native GUI applications), not all executables. The Twitter link indicates that you can still right-click an application, choose open and agree to let it run (this is only necessary the first time you run it), the current beta just removed the Download Apps From: Anywhere option. As of El Capitan (or maybe even Yosemite), OS X automatically changes the setting from Anywhere to App Store and identified developers after 30 days (there are extra command-line hoops to jump through to disable the 30 day expiration).

I'm in favor of the change as long as the contextual menu Open option remains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't think it's that big of a deal. You can still right-click to open the unsigned app and let it run, which to me is a better option than setting the option to Anywhere as I still want to see the prompt for unsigned apps.

In addition, the release notes mentioned there is a bug related to this suggesting they do not intend to disable this function.

</comment><comment><USER8> It looks like the fact that the button is missing, is an acknowledged bug, if you read through this conversation on Twitter... [https://twitter.com/patrickwardle/status/742511355614224385?...](https://twitter.com/patrickwardle/status/742511355614224385?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

</comment><comment><USER9> Apple is A/B testing if it's the right time to make macOs even more like iOS with this change (small radio button but huge consequence). Looks like people are not happy with it so they'll probably roll it back but until when ?

</comment><comment><USER10> Can you still right-click on an unsigned app and choose Open to get a confirmation dialog?

<comment><USER11> They mention this as a valid workaround. Personally, given this, I don't know why anyone would ever have used the "Any" setting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> `find /usr/local -flags +x -type f -exec codesign -s "-" {};`

I'm not convinced forcing codesigning in something like brew is the worst idea ever though...

<comment><USER12> also, shameless plug, does anyone know how ad-hoc code signing actually works in OS X?

[https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/234425/how-does- ad...](https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/234425/how-does-ad-hoc- codesigning-work-and-where-is-it-described)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> None at all? So you'd be paying for the privilege of writing code for your own computer? Wow.

<comment><USER14> Monetarily you only need to pay if you intend to distribute via the App Store.

Non-App Store distribution just requires a free Apple Developer account.

<comment><USER15> I think most people would agree that it's not the money that's the issue, it's that you need to somehow register with apple to compile and develop and app (presuming that's what this means).

Also what does this imply about non-apple toolsets? If I decide I want to try out gcc 6 on my mac, could I then not run programs compiled with it?</comment></comment></comment>


Balancing Bike-Share Stations Has Become a Scientific Endeavor - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/08/balancing-bike-share-stations-has-become-a-serious-scientific-endeavor/379188/ <comment><USER2> Most of the current systems appear to use manual rebalancing - if bikes aren't evenly distributed someone from the company operation the bike share program manually distributes bikes from one station to another station.

I wonder how well an "economic" approach to this problem would work: Dynamically price the cost of a bike based on the station where the bike is taken and on the station where the bike is returned too. Then, if you want to distribute bikes from one station to another station you could assign a negative price for these routes, and thereby increase the traffic in that opposite direction.

Assuming that the traffic behavior is relatively stable you don't even need dynamic pricing, but instead might be able to announce the pricing for a particular route weeks in advance.

<comment><USER3> The problem is people don't pick their routes based on cost, they pick their routes based on where they're trying to go to.

<comment><USER4> I think what he means by "negative cost" is that you actually pay people (in credit), to take the bike to the desired station.

<comment><USER3> Yes that's what I understood as well, although that's just one component of "dynamically price". And even that isn't really going to work. That's equivalent to just paying someone outright to rebalance bikes, except it's ad- hoc, only moves one bike at a time, and significantly complicates the process.

<comment><USER5> I agree that _making money_ through riding a bike from a low to high demand station would be an edge case, but I don't see how it adds significant complication. You just list what the price would be at different stations if they return the bike there, with some being refunds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I recently published on the same topic. [1]

In many bike sharing systems (such as in London), there is a daily repeating cycle, where too many people want to get to the city center in the morning and back out in the early evening. You know that will happen. So countermeasures can be taken early on.

[1] Dynamic Vehicle Redistribution and Online Price Incentives in Shared Mobility Systems, [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumb...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6754195)

<comment><USER7> Why is this a problem? If X people take bikes into the city center in the morning, and then the same X people take bikes back out in the evening, that sounds balanced to me.

<comment><USER8> That only works if there are enough bikes for each bike to be used only once during the morning or evening commute. If you need to reuse a bike multiple times in one morning (say at 8am, 9am, and 10am) to serve everyone, it has to somehow go where someone will use it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe the real solution is social rather than technical?

How many move around to different places for the sake of internet points? Seemingly lots of them. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingress_(game)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingress_\(game\))

Can we just convince them to balance our bike shares instead?

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how this problem is solved by car2go. There are no stations to drop the vehicle, and cars can not be transported in bulk. Would it help to get rid of the stations for the bikes?

<comment><USER11> In Germany, Call-a-bike (Deutsche Bahn) [1] operates exactly like this. Bikes can be rented everywhere inside the city, and can be left on every junction within a city. There are no drop-off/rental stations.

So far, I did not have any problems to find a bike when I needed it.

[1] [http://www.bahn.de/p/view/service/fahrrad/call_a_bike.shtml](http://www.bahn.de/p/view/service/fahrrad/call_a_bike.shtml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How do these systems work if there are not enough stations to return your bike?</comment>


Scripting Layer for Android - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

<comment><USER2> SL4A has been around for a number of years. It was previously called Android Scripting Environment until the name change a few years ago.

It's indeed neat, but releases and progress has been slow-going. The last releases were in early 2011. I don't know of anyone else who uses it, besides myself, but it's cool.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is huge. The doors are now open for individuals to write their own little custom automata. Even if you can just write your own app and install the APK automatically, I get the feeling that having to adopt the Java paradigm and scaffolding is a big barrier for many who want to automate small tasks for themselves.

</comment><comment><USER4> Last release was Feb 2011. I remember when this project started, it made the news. Does anyone use it? It would be nice to develop apps in python especially if it could build a mobile friendly GUI.

I think stuff like Phonegap has really eaten its lunch and stolen its thunder.

<comment><USER5> Tried using but gave up. It doesn't support all the native API features. So starting to develop an app using Python would eventually end up just re- writing it using Java. So just used Java to begin with.

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://ruboto.org/>

>Ruboto allows you to run Ruby scripts on Android devices. Using Ruby code, you have access to the complete Android API. Currently, we have 2 offerings: ruboto and ruboto-irb. Ruboto is based on JRuby.

The sl4a Ruby interpreter is based on Ruboto. So accesing the Android API with Ruby is posible. JRuby is Java after all, check their site.

P.S. I wish I had the skill to help out in this project.</comment></comment></comment>


Dopamine Hits Newsletter - <AUTHOR> https://preview.mailerlite.com/u8i4m1 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone,

Here's a little bit about me and the newsletter I decided to create and launch.

I tend to be interested in various topics on any given day. Deep diving into a topic often leads to another, sometimes related other-times not.

This is how my brain functions... some call it scattered others call it 'all over the place'. But I call it curiosity and the drive to learn.

The Dopamine Hits newsletter is my outlet. Its a place where I can read, summarize, and provide links to various articles.

To be honest, its been fun doing the research on various topics not only for myself but for others who learn or prefer to learn in this style.

I have only created one email (working on #2) but I wanted to document my journey thus far and also provide value to others who may be interested.

If you are interested and do read the preview please let me know your thoughts and suggestions on how I can improve.

I am using Roam (more and more these days) which I am sure will lead to interesting subjects in the near future.

Thanks for reading my post.

Stay safe, Paolo</comment>


Show HN: DashBrief – Freshdesk reporting dashboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.dashbrief.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys,

I've been working on reports for Freshdesk customers. This is my poc, I know it's very ugly, but any feedback is overwhelmingly welcome.

Thanks!</comment>


Lessons from Several Startups: Why not to Sweat YC - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2007/10/who_me_worry.php

<comment><USER2> I like your batback and your shared folder ideas. You shouldn't give up just because of the amount of work. Find someone to help you for a few hours on the scaling problem I bet that can be fixed with some indexing of tables and faster sql code.

In 2001/2002 I needed some help money wise, I had done some websites and developed relationships with the owners of the companies. I went to those people and they gave me extra work and extra money. It didn't last but it got me over a bump that I wouldn't have otherwise.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've been accused of posting this as a shameless attempt to get attention from YC.

I'd like to deny this charge. In fact, it's a shameless attempt to tell the _readers_ of news.YC about all the cool stuff I've been doing. YC has nothing to do with it.

What can I say? You can either talk about what you're doing next, or you can go out there and do it. :)

<comment><USER3> >I've been accused of posting this as a shameless attempt to get attention from YC.

I would bet that they only look at the news.yc posts for the most promising applications anyways, and then only as a mostly incidental thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you missed my point.

Here we are on news.yc on the day before the big announcement.

Do you have any idea how many people are poking around the site, looking for what happens? It's like having 5 minutes with 50 of the coolest people you'd like to meet.

Kapiche?

I mean, the article was from the heart, true, and in line with the narrative on the board. But that doesn't mean there can't be a value-added situation going on here as well.

<comment><USER3> Ah, ok. Well, there's never any shame in posting something you wrote here. I appreciated what you wrote and submitted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> what part of the country are you in?

<comment><AUTHOR> Southeast. A few hours south of D.C.

<comment><USER4> Is that around Norfolk, VA? While my brother was in the Navy he was stationed there and I traveled out there once or twice.

<comment><AUTHOR> 4 hours south along the mountain chain. About an hour from Blacksburg.

Let's put it this way, when I tell people I'm working on a web application, it's not uncommon that they think it has something to do with spiders. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Piston, a prototype video game engine written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/piston-workspace/releases/tag/0.1 <comment><AUTHOR> Despite being in such an immature state, Rust has an encouragingly large community of game development enthusiasts (107 users in the #rust-gamedev IRC channel as we speak). I'm very excited to see engines like this emerge from community efforts!

<comment><USER2> To be fair, Rust may be the first modern language seemingly designed around the same set of problems that we encounter in Game Development. I'm actually pretty surprised that it's as little known in GameDev as it is. That is perhaps due to it's immaturity.

<comment><USER3> Genuinely curious: what makes it especially appropriate for gamedev?

<comment><USER4> The AAA game developers we've talked to are universally in agreement that the lack of garbage collection and the fine-grained control over memory that Rust provides are extremely important for game development.

<comment><USER3> For sure that'd be useful for AAA dev, but unless the console manufacturers are willing to incorporate it into the official toolchains it's dead in the water.

<comment><USER5> Rust and the PS4 toolchain are both LLVM. So I can see some possibility there. Rust currently runs on it's own patchset now, but the intention is to be fully working with mainline LLVM.

<comment><USER2> Does Rust's patches affect codegen? Hypothetically, if not, you should be able to just feed the IL files into the PS4 toolchain.

<comment><USER5> As dbaupp said it's only an optimisation. So you should be able to use mainline LLVM now. Therefore using PS4 with Rust wouldn't be too complicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Absolutely love this rusty community. It's refreshing being surrounded by so many people consistently passionate about the language and its potential. Really looking forward to what this turns into!

</comment><comment><USER7> If anyone is interested in a meetup about Rust's growing gaming infrastructure, we are having a meetup on 6/26 ([http://www.meetup.com/Rust- Bay-Area/events/171111672/](http://www.meetup.com/Rust-Bay- Area/events/171111672/)) and a hackathon on 6/28 ([http://www.meetup.com/Rust- Bay-Area/events/183377112/](http://www.meetup.com/Rust-Bay- Area/events/183377112/)). If you can't make it in person, we will be streaming the meetup over [https://air.mozilla.org](https://air.mozilla.org), where you can watch it live.

</comment><comment><USER8> I did not know that Rust had C#-style attributes (annotations)! Will they allow creating custom ones and reflecting on them at runtime?

<comment><USER4> Like type information, attributes are generally boiled away during the build in order to save space in the executable. So you can't reflect on them at runtime.

However, you can make custom attributes expand to arbitrary generated code via the macro system, allowing something similar. This is how we do fast JSON serialization, for instance: the #[deriving(Encodable)] attribute expands to optimized, type-specialized code at compile time, avoiding costly reflection at runtime. (Note that this is an experimental feature, so it may change post 1.0.)

<comment><USER8> Reflection is not possible in Rust?

<comment><USER4> It is somewhat supported at the moment, but it's experimental and we may remove the support for it. Reflection always carries an overhead in terms of binary size and as a result many of us feel that it's inappropriate for a low- level systems language like Rust.

<comment><USER2> In theory, given the attribute, and macro system, it should be possible to implement this as a library in the language, correct? I think that is vastly preferred over a constant runtime always hanging around.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gender in the Substance of Chemistry, Part 1: The Ideal Gas [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.hyle.org/journal/issues/18-2/kovacs1.pdf <comment><USER2> I had never noticed that the term "ideal gas law" is Platonic in nature, and how that brings in language like "deviations", unlike the ways we describe the other states of matter.

I agree that the model of an ideal gases has similarities to free agents in liberalism, with historic connections as well. I worry, though, that it's too easy to cherry-pick similarities. Is it even closer to describing anarchy?

I do not know enough social theory to make an informed comment on that aspect of the paper.</comment>


Juvenolatry in Hollywood - writers washed up at 30 - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704853404575322890739438692.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion <comment><USER2> What a great word -- _juvenolatry_ \-- hadn't heard it before.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope that at least a few middle-aged actresses are getting a laugh out of this.

But "juvenolatry" strikes me as a barbarous coinage.</comment>


Life at the Palace (1996) - <AUTHOR> http://truecenterpublishing.com/psycyber/palacestudy.html <comment><USER2> ha! I was a software developer at The Palace ..my first Internet startup :) I did tech support for The Palace server then went on to coding in next generation projects ..like an ICQ-like instant messenger called Little Buddy.</comment>


According to the 80/20 Rule, the top 1% should have over 50% of the wealth - <AUTHOR> The 80/20 rule (Pareto principle) is found to be applicable almost everywhere.  So why shouldn't it be applicable to income?
top 20% have 80% of wealth top 20% of that 20% (4%) have 64% of wealth top 20% of that 4% (.8%) have 51% of wealth
This is inline with what we see in the real world:
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/14/richest-1percent-half-global-wealth-credit-suisse-report <comment><USER2> link --> [http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/14/richest-1per...](http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/14/richest-1percent- half-global-wealth-credit-suisse-report)</comment>


Ego depletion theory may have been debunked - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story/2016/03/ego_depletion_an_influential_theory_in_psychology_may_have_just_been_debunked.single.html <comment><USER3> Here's the scary part to me:

> "For a second paper published last year, Carter and McCullough completed a > second meta-analysis that included different studies, including 48 > experiments that had never been published. Again, they found "very little > evidence" of a real effect."

> ""All of a sudden it felt like everything was crumbling," says Carter, now > 31 years old and not yet in a tenure-track position. "I basically lost my > compass. Normally I could say, all right there have been 100 published > studies on this, so I can feel good about it, I can feel confident. And then > that just went away.""

So you have at least 100 bullshit studies on a really popular and often citied experiment. If bullshit can hide in plain sight like this, imagine what is lurking out of sight?

<comment><USER4> Didn't you read the Memo?

Science is a lot like sausage processing. The end result may range from the quite passable to the quite good, but if you actually saw the raw materials and the process, you'd be more discriminant on what you put in your plate.

<comment><USER5> One possible advantage the "harder" sciences have is that another study that builds on the previous one can in some ways act as a replication.

If I publish something claiming bacteria has a gene X that produces phenotype Y, then a subsequent study that transfers gene X into a different bacteria must also observe Y. Otherwise something is fishy, and often the second set of researchers will go back and reexamine the original result.

It's rare that work in science is directly, point for point replicated, it's unsexy, expensive work. The fact that the harder sciences have somewhat of a built in control mitigates but by no means eliminates the risk of bad science surviving.

I can't think of an analogous process in the softer sciences. Seeing if a phenomenon is replicated in a different context does not implicitly re-test the original work in the same way.

<comment><USER6> One of the biggest things about the "harder" sciences is that there's usually a whole engineering discipline behind them as well. Nothing reproduces a result as effectively as a host of engineers building real things on the back of it. If it doesn't work, we'll find out pretty soon, and if it does work then we'll have lots of evidence to show it.

The problem with results like "ego depletion" is that their utility is fuzzy at best. With no clear application, we don't have a body of practical results using it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who was once a bench scientist, I'd love to think I was immune to these kinds of pitfalls. After all, we control things carefully in the lab, we can control many more of the inputs to an experiment, test a hypothesis by different avenues, have truly independent controls...

But this is a very large literature, that in effect by sheer volume of work was doing many of those things. This is quite humbling.

That said, I do think that medical science, though massively flawed (see previous discussion on clinical trials no longer revealing positive results [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11209778](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11209778)) there is a way to make it so we can trust science. By:

1.) as previously said given a hypothesis, it must be confirmed by 2 independent approaches (if this is true, then this other thing should be true, is it?)

2.) publishing more negative results, removing the incentive for the file- drawer effect mentioned by @jobu

3.) require much larger sample sizes for studies to be published, and take effect size properly into account when judging whether the outcome is valid. One interesting way to do this:

[http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/retr...](http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/retropower_final.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe my definitions are off, but clicking or not clicking based on the arrangement of letters in a word seems like an cognitive task, not one of willpower; it seems pretty easy to do without much stress. So this new result seems like a very oblique attack, not a strike at the foundations of ego depletion theory.

<comment><USER8> For me this is quite interesting. Because some one has said that it has debunked a study doesn´t means that he has done it. There is still the possibility that the new study is the incorrect one.

That a team claims that there is a problem it is a good sign that this needs more studies. But it will be jumping to conclusions telling people that the original study has been debunked.

<comment><USER9> There can always be more studies, and there can always be the possibility of error.

However, consider if the two studies were reversed in time, so the first study specified what its endpoints were, then did the study, and concluded there was no impact.

Then the second study came along, and during data analysis an interesting correlation appeared which showed there was a impact.

Assuming that both were done by equally competent researchers, which conclusions would you trust more, and why?

Do your conclusions change if you swap the time order?

Personally, I would trust the study with the well-defined endpoints over the other one, but I also feel within myself the desire to trust the first one - even though the order shouldn't change things.

<comment><USER10> If the studies were reversed I think my opinion would be the same. We don't know that much about ego depletion. If it exists or what's driving it.

I think it means ego depletion is much more fragile than we thought or is caused by some other phenomenon. I don't think this study means the thing we called ego depletion doesn't exist and is an artifact of publication bias and chance. It seems to me like there were just too many studies replicating it for that to be true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not to be an ass - but I've got to ask. Does the "reproducibility crisis" have any policy or political implications for the "global warming" threat? I know nothing about climatology, and since I can't judge the "conservative" critiques of the consensus on their own merits, my tendency is to dismiss them as politically motivated and hence unreliable. As folks keep saying, "The science is settled." But if the science was settled in this instance, is it possible that my strategy for sorting through the debate - which I suspect is in fact a pretty common strategy - is in fact premature?

<comment><USER12> One difference here which might give you an idea of where to place your bets is that the conservative opposition to global warming is based largely on studies financed by the energy industry. The willpower research is being called into question by researchers who don't have a link to any industry with a vested interest in the outcome.

Is this an airtight argument? No. There is still the possibility that global warming research has analogous methodological issues. But the conflict of interest definitely raises the burden of proof.

An additional difference is that climatology research is much better founded than willpower research is. Psychology is notoriously tricky to test since you can't break apart a brain and watch all the parts interacting. Compared to psychology, the systems that climatologists study are downright simple, and we have good models of how the systems behave.

<comment><USER11> I agree that the conflict of interest definitely raises the bar. But of course, that's what I immediately hear from my conservative friends as well: that papers which support the consensus are more likely to be published, that studies likely to confirm the consensus are more likely to be funded, and researchers who question that consensus are likely to be blackballed by their colleagues. Not being on the inside, I don't have any special insight as to whether or how strong the dynamic operates, of course. Which means that as an non-scientist, I sometimes feel like I'm in a pretty poor state to actually know what's true. Like I said, my instinct is to respect the consensus. But the evidence seems to have increased over the last decade or so that "consensus" can be a pretty poor pointer to the truth. And I want to take that evidence into account as well.

<comment><USER12> Actually, scientists have a huge incentive to overthrow an existing regime if it's bad but nobody knows it yet. It will make your career if you are able to prove it. The evidence required is high if what you're trying to disprove is well supported, but if you can provide that evidence there will be a wellspring of PhD students ready to ride that wave and build their careers.

For climate deniers, the evidence just isn't there. There's no wave to ride.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the interesting things that occurs to me when I read this is the potential failure for researchers to remember one great way to test a hypothesis is to test a competing hypothesis.

So for example, in the cookie/radish story, were all participants exposed to the cookie smell? Were they aware some people got cookies and some people got radishes?

If so, the reduced performance of the radish group could be related to a feeling of being pushed down in the social hierarchy, a self-esteem blow, because they were denied a perk other participants received.

I intuitively feel some of these psychological experiments suffer from this. That there is another phenomenon which is really close to the one they think they are studying, which is how they get it wrong. Because the brain/sense of self are both such complex interrelated systems and it is extremely hard to make distinctions between different elements of the process.

<comment><USER14> > one great way to test a hypothesis is to test a competing hypothesis.

Isn't it worse than that? A statistical hypothesis test will essentially just let you refute the null hypothesis, it provides no confirmation at all for a specific alternative hypothesis (unless of course it's the only possible alternative hypothesis).

A funny story comes to mind: I studied physics at university but did one semester of psychology. One day in class we did an experiment that was supposed to show that memory is organized into something called schemas, but the experiment seemed severely flawed to me and I couldn't help protest that a much more reasonable interpretation of the outcome was that "people who have actually been told a story will be better at retelling the story, at least when compared to people who have _not_ been told the story." On hearing this criticism my professor became silent for a moment and then said something along the lines of:

"I have a colleague who's son borrows his bike when his own is broken. This colleague sometimes says that his son thinks that his bike will mend itself if left to its own devices. Well, that's one way to interpret the data..."

I thought it was a brilliant way to acknowledge my criticism. But my fellow students unfortunately didn't seem to get it. I guess psychology was never for me. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm in the middle of Thinking Fast and Slow which revolves heavily around ego depletion and this is very surprising. They cite a ton of evidence and the guy won a Nobel Prize for his work. Hard to imagine so much of it could be flat wrong.

<comment><USER16> He also said there "you cannot argue with the evidence"... I'm glad someone is trying.

<comment><USER17> The thing is, you can always argue with evidence, you just need newer evidence.

There is only a few special case exceptions where this presents a problem, which are mostly thought experiments in astronomy where the evidence will be lost in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am a big believer that leaders need to understand social psychology. Unfortunately every one of these debunking studies makes it very hard for the non-expert to know what to apply in the field. It's very frustrating! (I suppose one could say the same about economics)

<comment><USER19> If by social psychology you mean "the way people think and behave socially", i agree. If you mean "the results and theories of the discipline called 'social psychology'", i disagree. It must be the case that each of us has some understanding of our social behavior and the behavior of others. Otherwise we would never form social structures.

i don't know if i've ever gained real insight into human behavior from reading the results of a contrived experiment.

<comment><USER18> _i don 't know if i've ever gained real insight into human behavior from reading the results of a contrived experiment._

Therein lies my problem. :-) I want to know more, but most sources are woefully unreliable.

<comment><USER19> Your own life is the richest source of information you have about social psychology!

<comment><USER20> No, your life is a source of proverbs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _may_ have been debunked

Baumeister has yet to be steamrolled by the reproducibility crusaders

</comment><comment><USER22> > Just two of the [24] research groups produced a significant, positive effect

If only they had used green jelly beans instead [^1]...

This is not limited to social psychology. Scientific publishing has a strong bias towards positive results. As long as null results are filed away, this kind of thing will continue to happen.

[1]: [https://xkcd.com/882/](https://xkcd.com/882/)

</comment><comment><USER23> > "It's easier to publish stuff that tears something down than it is to build > something up," he told me wearily. "It's not an enjoyable time. It's not > much fun."

If your proposed effect is real then you should have no problem in proving it. If it doesn't exist, or if it does, but is much smaller and doesn't apply nearly as broadly as you have stated, then of course you will have "not much fun" proving it. Especially if that fun means making tens or even hundreds of experiments, then exhaustively processing data to find some experiments with positive result and discarding the rest, then again looking for explanations why these positive result experiments are right, and null or negative are somehow flawed. Not only that, but you have to avoid contradictions with older studies.

<comment><USER24> Also, it may be technically "easier" to tear-down a hypothesis, but the _rewards_ (prestige and attention) often come from going the other way.

At least, up until whatever-it-is becomes established enough that tearing it down is novel and surprising.

<comment><USER23> It should be established that tearing things down that looked solid and accepted before is novel and surprising. Because it is. Especially when so many people have worked on top of that.

Once everything that was tearable is teared down, the remaining picture will be much more reliable representation of what is real and what is not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like Baumeister and Tice. They make interesting theories, especially the talk "Is there anything good about men?" But this is good too -- showing that science can be messy. Makes me think of Thom Hartmann's "farmer vs hunter" analogy for ADHD, and Bem's studies on precognition.

Science is a human endeavor and as such is subject to lots of economic and mass psychological effects, but at least there is some constraint on what can be claimed. The truth is out there, in physics and other hard sciences. In everything else, the models are much more handwavy approximations of underlying complexity and variation.

</comment><comment><USER26> The saddest thing is that since "ego depletion is a normal thing for every human" is no more a reliable concept, people will miss an explanation for their forthcoming loss of will power or failures in their life :)

<comment><USER27> Time to start coming up with some new models then ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > "When he and his adviser, Michael McCullough, reanalyzed the 2010 paper's > data using state-of-the-art analytic methods, they found no effect."

Hmm...what was different this time?

</comment><comment><USER29> Funny thing is that the debunking of ego-depletion theory has some interesting intersection with another article posted on the front page of HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11231371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11231371)

</comment><comment><USER30> Self control as a static variable is not equally useful across all situations... I find it improbable that humans would have only a single 'algorithm' through which to mediate executive function. Surely the dominant strategy would be greatly affected by the environment?

Psychology is an interesting field, because one really has to wonder just how static human beings actually are over time...It seems almost probable to assume people living today would handle the same experimental setup quite differently than those who lived 50 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER31> I fail to see the significance of this, other than a shift in what sort of self-help books are sold.

Are there any widespread pedagogic or management practices that are built on top of ego depletion?

<comment><USER32> I'd say it has had a profound effect. The thought that you can wear down someone's willpower by making them make too many decisions is pretty scary if your job is to make decisions. One work-around that, for example, the POTUS has espoused is wearing the same clothes every day. (One less decision to make.)

See: [http://www.fastcompany.com/3026265/work-smart/always-wear- th...](http://www.fastcompany.com/3026265/work-smart/always-wear-the-same- suit-obamas-presidential-productivity-secrets)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The framing of this article very much misunderstands the scientific method.

Science is a process. It's a method where you conduct a series of disciplined, reproducible experiments and use this data to build a _model_ of the truth. Science never gives you the truth directly; instead, you get a series of successively more accurate representations of the truth that you can use to make predictions. Those predictions are not guaranteed to always yield a positive result, but when they come up negative, you have more data with which to refine your theories.

Casting this in black and white terms - "this effect has been debunked" \- is doing a disservice to science.

Rather, a negative result in this study should be grounds for further investigation. _Why_ did it come up with different results? Is there something different about how they ran the study? Is there something different about the _subjects_ , something that may hold useful lessons in its own right? Was the original data flawed? Does the effect hold only under certain conditions? All of these would be very useful things to know. The point of science is not to say "This is true and this is not", it's to be able to create increasingly refined models of "This is true under these conditions, and if you apply this model in this situation, you will get these results."

By analogy with physics: the ancient Egyptians (the Ptolemaic kings) believed that the sun revolved around the earth. To make this model work, they had to invent increasingly more complex epicycles in the motions of planets. Copernicus came around and showed that the earth revolved around the sun in a circle. Kepler re-examined this data and said no, planets actually move in _ellipsis_. Einstein re-examined this data and came up with a tensor calculus that even more accurately predicted the orbits of the outer planets. Now, there is strong evidence that Einstein's theory of general relativity is "wrong" too, but we don't have anything to replace it with.

Was the Ptolemaic calculation wrong? Well, technically not - as my physics professor pointed out, they were just doing a Fourier decomposition of the observed data. And for a kid making a sun-dial on a beach or a hiker who wants to know when the sun will set, the first term of that series is perfectly adequate. But the advantages of the heliocentric and relativistic models are that they can predict the data with increasing accuracy, _without_ adding extraneous magic numbers.

Similarly, when a psychological study can't be replicated, it doesn't necessarily mean the basic idea is useless. Rather, it means that we should look further into the _situations_ where that idea is useless, and refine our models so they gain additional predictive power.

<comment><USER34> So then, one could propose any ridiculous hypothesis (e.g. vaccines do not work), and when nobody can reproduce the results, applying your line of argument, it would lead us down a rabbit hole of second guessing and proposing even more complex reasons as to why others are unable to reproduce the results.

I think that in the - day-to-day usage of the word / most commonly understood meaning of the word - 'true', it is fair to say that Science _is_ in the business of determining truth from fantasy. Sure, you are permitted under science to investigate anything and everything that pleases you/(your donors :) ). I think that scientific consensus is very closely associated with 'truth'.

I totally get the larger point you're making, but even the nature of science itself is a bit of a grey area. I think that some ideas should, and have been laughed out of the room. The so called man-on-the-street does not have time for subtlety or scientific hypotheses which are carefully couched in nuanced terminology. I think that its OK for people to think that science has all the answers, every once in a while :)

<comment><USER33> The "vaccines cause autism" scare is actually a good example of science working. It was investigated - as it should have been, because if vaccines _did_ cause autism that would be a massive public health crisis - and then they found that the original author falsified the data. The unfortunate part is that that finding hasn't made it into public consciousness the way the original scare did.

I think that the belief that science = received truth is behind the rejection of science by a large portion of the population, because it puts it in conflict with _other_ sources of "received truth". People discount evolution as "just a theory" because they're looking for absolute truth; if they were habitually trained to look for evidence and then knew the body of evidence behind evolution, and could compare it with the body of evidence behind gospel, they might understand that "theory" is a lot more rigorously proven than "truth".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > _Eating a radish when you're surrounded by fresh-baked cookies represents an > epic feat of self-denial_

This is just so much BS. I could bathe in radish. All the chocolate cookies in the world can go hang themselves if there's radish around.

Maybe my ego feels so depleted because I just haven't had any radish yet this year. But I did have mountains of cookies.

</comment><comment><USER36> calling psychology a soft science is like calling water a soft solid. Science is based on isolating causality in a reliable, repeatable manner. Human behavior is extremely, deeply context dependant, and in a complex multi layered chaotic way.

<comment><USER37> Well, science is about doing experiments. It's really difficult to isolate causality with psychology, but possible to at least identify patterns. And then it takes more experiments to peel off those patterns.

This is a really good case of science at work. It's an experiment that specifically targeted ego depletion and couldn't find it.

I find it a bit worrying that so many people immediately agree to the conclusion proposed by these experiments. Ego depletion is one thing, but there are other well-known effects like Pavlov's Dog.

<comment><USER36> they say credibility is hard to gain and easy to lose. Physics has as a standard to do predictions reproducible exactly to a something like 8 standard deviations. Psychology, as a domain, appears to be struggling to make predictions that are reproducible "up to 40% of the time". Now, even if we say they are twice that as an approximate totally unscientific show of good faith, we're still really far at 20% reproducible from reliable, credible knowledge as is promised by other fields, and would still make the field pretty murky at best

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Good. I am going to need unlimited will power to wade through the haystack of modern science and find the needles of truth.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's a little darkly funny how people react to perceived indignities in the sciences with the _exact same behavior pattern_ they're bemoaning.

The narrative of these people is that there are _bad people_ out there doing _unreproducible work._ They know they're bad, but they're just motivated by grants, low p-values, etc, and eventually they just snap and do bad science all over the place. It's an incentive problem.

So, to prove this, they... go get grants, do a meta-analysis with some nice statistics, and get subjected to the same incentive system. Except this time, they don't even have to do anything original. They just have to badly copy something else.

There's _always_ something like this in the article:

>In his lab, Baumeister told me, the letter e task would have been handled differently. First, he'd train his subjects to pick out all the words containing e, until that became an ingrained habit. Only then would he add the second rule, about ignoring words with e's and nearby vowels. That version of the task requires much more self-control, he says.

I really hate getting science news from sources like Slate, because you have to decompile the journalese into what the scientist actually said, but the technical terms here are that Baumeister had participants perform a fixed- target character recognition task. This is an incredibly old cognitive task that was used in some of the first cognitive psychology experiments like [[http://psych.indiana.edu/tradition/Shiffrin_and_Schneider_19...](http://psych.indiana.edu/tradition/Shiffrin_and_Schneider_1977.pdf)] that showed that over time with practice, a _controlled_ or _manual_ cognitive process, like "determine if this word contains the letter 'e'" will become an _automatic_ process.

My cognitive psychology professor was one of Shiffrin's students, so he was actually in that experiment, and was very annoyed by it, because in the fixed- target condition, you pretty quickly start noticing your target letter all the time. It'll just "pop" out at you when you're trying to read.

Obviously the exercise here won't cause that sort of behavior, but once you learn a rule like that and start having to react in miliseconds to the presence or absence of an e, even a little bit of training will create a much stronger effect than no training at all.

This is a huge study, and it would have been drastically more expensive if this facet had been included. But it also might have reproduced Baumeister's work much more fully and the answer would have been useful. As it is, this is literally more bad science, for exactly the same reason as the original science may or may not have been bad.

</comment><comment><USER40> In an ideal world, there would be a filter for all news, that contains "may have been". The filter would either:

* throw the article silently away

or

* substitute all occurrences with "may or may not have been", which is identical in meaning. I am sure more readers would notice, that they are being fed information tripe.

</comment><comment><USER41> It's examples like this - particular to psychology - which always give me a chance to reflect and chuckle about how I believe the 'science' of psychology to be academically pointless. Not to be confused with psychiatry, which I find to be a worthwhile medical, scientific pursuit (adding subtances/drugs does change the equation quite a bit). But real, authentic psychology is pretty much an observational writing exercise that, in my opinion, can't be broadly applied any more than general dietary advice.

Each individual's physiological composition makes psychology nothing more than a practice bed for bored creative writers. Understanding the psyche is critically important to write convincing characters, absolutely, and that takes a lot of practice and thought to fashion into a functional perspective (or literary craft tool) that enables a person to write "believable" characters. Observation, not causation, as it were.

It's not really a stretch to share this belief, if one were to be familiar with the origins of psychology that trace back to an esteemed writer and philosopher(and turn-of-the-century physician...) by the name of William James, brother of noteworty Henry James.

<comment><USER42> It's smug comments like this - particular to engineers - which always give me a chance to chuckle about how little computer programmers actually understand scientific practice.

 _All_ the same problems happen in biological sciences, and are even worse in some cases, since there's more money at stake. Failures to replicate are _rampant_ in medical/pharmaceutical studies.

If you want to claim biology's not scientific either, go ahead. But science is about seeking knowledge, not having total agreement all the time.

<comment><USER41> Well I'm not wrong that the origin of psychology is simply a blending of philosophy and writing, which are fundamentally outside the scope of the scientific method. I went out of my way to argue that biology-based science is truly science (e.g. psychiatry) but that didn't seem to register. Oh well, audiences miss the point all the time.

<comment><USER43> Research psychologists are at the forefront of science, the scientific method, and statistical methods.

Haven't you ever wondered why all of these articles by psychologists have been questing the very fundamentals of the way science is practiced? Psychology, as a field, is our day's premiere example of a science that examines itself. The issues with reproducibility are being illuminated and confronted by - <USER2> else? - psychologists.

You're wrong on virtually every count. The scientific method is the primary philosophy practiced by psychologists. I would encourage you to read more before making easily falsified statements like "psychology is ... fundamentally outside the scope of the scientific method."

<comment><USER44> To add some specifics to this pile-on:

\- The classical example of a randomized experiment is a perception/psychophysics experiment: the Lady Tasting Tea. This introduced the idea of a null hypothesis as well as Fisher's exact test. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea)

\- Visual and auditory experiments more or less invented signal detection theory and used it to probe visual and auditory processing. Those ROC curves everyone loves predate "machine learning" by decades.

\- A lot of the fancy hierarchical and Bayesian modeling work have come from psychologists and social scientists (e.g., Andrew Gelman)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> People need to stop doing meta-analysis * . Have you ever heard of meta- analysis of mathematics or physics papers? No? P = NP meta analysis maybe? Haha.

I can tell you why: Because if it's solid science, you don't need 100 papers to describe an effect. Besides, it is a proven fact that the results of meta- analysis are weaker due to how the underlying statistics works (at least if you do it in a naive way, and I do not know if it can be fixed by altering the procedure. I have to brush up on my statistics knowledge, it's good for machine learning.).

* EDIT: I should have added here 'to investigate the ground-truth of underlying papers.' Of course there's nothing wrong with meta-analysis to investigate researcher behaviour and methodology.

<comment><USER46> Actually: [https://www.win.tue.nl/~gwoegi/P-versus- NP.htm](https://www.win.tue.nl/~gwoegi/P-versus-NP.htm)

And amusingly, the distribution of result is close to 50/50

<comment><USER45> That's actually pretty cool. The difference is that here people are completely aware that this study does not in any way tell us whether P = NP (even if it was 100/0) as long as there's no solid proof on the table.

A meta-analysis in those fields is usually only used to analyze the behaviour and methodology of researchers, not to investigate the ground truth of the papers.

<comment><USER47> "The behaviour and methodology of researchers" is exactly that thing that will lead to the truths you seek. You're basically saying a bridge-builder needn't waste any time worrying about the engineering of boats.

<comment><USER45> While I admit it was wrong to claim that all meta-analysis is bad, the main point of my argument has not been refuted. You cannot inspect 100 papers and make a truth claim that is stronger than the quality of the papers, and doing so is a folly. Nobody in maths uses meta-analysis to prove a theorem.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Kaffee Bitte, specialty coffee delivery for Germany - <AUTHOR> https://kaffeebitte.de <comment><USER2> Mmmh, coffee.

* "Versand innerhalb einer Woche nach Röstung" \-- but how long after I order? I'm a spoiled Amazon Prime customer, and I can buy specialty coffee locally at a cafe, and so-so fresh roasted coffee at one of several roasters in my city of ~300k.

* The mandatory subscription is more of a hassle for me. I like to buy fresh groceries (and coffee) when I need them. One more thing to worry about when I go traveling: how many weeks of coffee can my mailbox fit?

On the other hand, subscriptions are great for offices, but which company orders specialty grade coffee? I wouldn't waste it on the typical fully automatic Jura.

* It doesn't say "specialty coffee" on the page, just "frisch geröstet" and "großartig" (everybody can claim that). I was very confused at first, but spent some time to look closer _only because you explicitly said so in the submission title_. Since there are several roasters in my city, "fresh" is where I start at, it's not interesting by itself.

I don't think you should completely rebrand the beans. Bonanza Coffee is well- known among your target audience, whereas you are some new guys that I don't know if I can trust yet. I'd try to build more on the credibility of the established roasters. A Bonanza bag in the hero image would have been an instant signal.

* The espresso in the hero image has zero crema. Not every coffee gives lots of crema, but for the title image I'd pick one that does, and extract it properly:

[http://www.home-barista.com/knockbox/lets-see-your-tiger- str...](http://www.home-barista.com/knockbox/lets-see-your-tiger- stripes-t23996-10.html)

* As others have already stated, the registration step is too early in the order flow. I don't want to register before I know that a) I want your stuff, b) the product is on stock and c) I'm okay with all the terms and conditions. Maybe the one coffee that I wanted is sold out, maybe you ship with Hermes or require Paypal. I'd like to know as much of this as possible before handing out my data.

* Phoenix Coffee from Dresden is pretty good

<comment><USER3> I hope they provide roast-on dates, otherwise you can basically assume it isn't fresh. With fast logistics and shipping you can get 1-week old roasted coffee from roaster to subscription service to doorstep though (Craft Coffee does this).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, all our packages have the roasting date on the label. The German post delivers over night in the vicinity of Berlin and in 1-2days elsewhere in Germany. We usually send the coffee out on the same day it arrives from the roasters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Their website is disturbing close to the excellent North America premium coffee service I use, Craft Coffee (@craftcoffee ; [https://www.craftcoffee.com/](https://www.craftcoffee.com/)). Maybe it's just me, or maybe it's just the red logo and brown vac bags, but this kind of smacks of that crappy "just different enough to not be infringement" move.

Besides that (and Germans need coffee too!), getting premium coffee delivered is such an amazing thing. I now live in a smaller Canadian city and my fresh roasted, premium coffee options have declined. I've been enjoying Craft Coffee for several months now and not only is the product excellent (I do regular reviews on Twitter, @quinndupont), they are a really great group of people who are always willing to reach out and help or just take suggestions. A start up that actually listens and cares; it's the main reason why I like to support new businesses.

[Edit: one of the best things about Craft Coffee is that they source their fresh-roasted beans from all over North America, so you get the cream of the crop from roasters you'd never be able to enjoy otherwise; you get three different roasters each month.]

And, if you happen to sign up for Craft Coffee (I totally recommend it!), they offer a 15% off coupon code. Look around for a friend's code (they get a free month if you sign up), or (trying not to spam here...) use mine: quinn1922.

<comment><USER4> A) I actually thought they ARE the german sibling of craftcoffee, but thanks for the clarification. They indeed look like a copy, but I don't mind that as long it doesn't lack in the execution and quality.

B) Since you seem to be a coffee expert: What sort of coffee has a very low acidic profile, whilst having being strong and aromatic?

C) To use the service you need to own a EUR 1000+ coffee machine, which only rich people have, or am I wrong?

<comment><USER3> a) I don't believe they are associated with Craft Coffee, but I'm just a pleased customer, with no inside information. They looks very, very similar, but with just enough difference to suggest that they are separate. Craft Coffee only supplies NA, so, I guess I'm happy to see similar companies for the Germans, and the Brits, etc.

b) I wouldn't call myself an expert, but I'd suggest you look at more of the "newer" West coast style of roasts. Look for "medium" roast beans; the old "full city" (or darker) will give you the strength, but little else. Growing location will not have as much of an impact on those qualities as the roast (different regions tend to have different aromatics, but if you aren't picky about berries versus vegetal versus leather, then ignore the growing source). As for the combination of all of those qualities, it might be tricky: "strong" usually comes at the expense of "aromatic", and "acidity" may be present no matter (although, for my palette, "bitterness" is MUCH more important than acidity--some acidity can be quite nice). The basic tips to get quality coffee are: (medium roast) beans between 3 days and 2 weeks old, use more coffee than you would think is correct (best is to weigh your beans & water), have your water temp at about 95c (not boiling), and make the amount of time between grind and brew as short as possible (ideally <10seconds).

c) Certainly not! My daily brew method is an Aeropress ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroPress](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroPress)) available on Amazon or better cafes for <$40 (including all the filters and everything). It only makes a cup at a time, but if you are drinking solo this works (and it takes <2 min start-to-finish to brew). Alternatively, try a "pour over", which is really just a holder for a coffee filter, which you can pick up for $5 practically anywhere (most people think of it as "camping style" but they are totally wrong!). Or, French press (<$40), which won't have the aromatics of the other two methods, but will make a nice strong cup. Also, consider splurging on a good (burr) grinder (~$100), it is WAY more important than your "machine".

<comment><USER4> Awesome!

Thanks for the detailed answer, sir :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of Pact (www.pactcoffee.com) which is a subscription-based- specialty-coffee-delivery company serving the UK (or at least London). I've used them and liked the service. I see how people that are really serious about their coffee could use a service like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed! We actually know the Pact guys – they're doing a terrific job in the UK.

<comment><USER6> Any chance you or them know of a similar service in France? I've just discovered Pact in the UK and am about to move :(

<comment><USER7> Craft Coffee ships to France now. [http://www.craftcoffee.com/international](http://www.craftcoffee.com/international)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's also sonntagmorgen.com, who have been in this space since 2007. I know the founder and he's a really great guy, pulled this of while he was studying. Also, over Christmas, they always offer a coffee "Advent Calendar" with a small bag of a different type of coffee for every day up to the 24th.

That's always a small christmas highlight for me, and I enjoy it much more than the chocolate stuff that other calendars tend to offer.

I tend to consume a lot of coffee and I'm always happy to find new deliverers with new coffees, so I'll give this a try. Best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I only know the Sonntagmorgen guys from their videos, but they seem to be really nice.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you'd like to try it, you'll get 20% off your first three bags with the code 'hackernews'!

<comment><USER9> Will you guys start sending to Switzerland? We're soo close :)

<comment><USER7> Craft Coffee ships to Switzerland now. [http://www.craftcoffee.com/international](http://www.craftcoffee.com/international)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks great. This is a kind of "stole my idea" sites that I'm very happy to see.

When I lived in the UK, I ordered coffee from hasbean[0], which is totally great. It's still available from Germany, but delivery cost and time makes it less appealing.

Was looking for something similar when I moved to Berlin, but couldn't find anything like that so far[1].

It does seem a bit pricey at a first glance (although it includes postage, right?), and selection is a bit limited... Couldn't work out the frequency and whether or not it's a subscription or you just order online when you want? my German + Google translate are not enough to figure this out.

Keep at it and hope you enjoy the Burgers at BBI near your office :)

[0] hasbean.co.uk

[1] I'm currently ordering online from solvino.de and they offer quite a wide selection from a nice roasters in Hamburg.

<comment><USER10> A small suggestion: let people choose the coffee first, and only register or pay later. I think it will be a more engaging experience.

I would encourage to remove registration completely or make it optional and let people pay by credit card / paypal for a quick and easy ordering experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that's great feedback! In the beginning we thought, that the German word for subscription has a negative connotation, so we tried to rather call it "continuous delivery". But I agree, it's a lot better to just be really clear about everything. We're working on improving the messaging in that regard.

It is pricey, but it's also really great coffee, that is imported and roasted in small batches with lots of love :) The compensation is passed through to the producer, so everybody gets a fair amount of money – the prices the farmers get are a multiple of the normal fair trade prices, and decoupled from the world market prices because of the higher quality.

I do enjoy the burgers, whenever I can handle standing in line for a while, haha :)

<comment><USER10> Thanks for clarifying. Yes, I heard that people in Germany are scared of long 'Abos' that they can't cancel.

It makes any subscription-based business harder to build here. Even if you offer complete flexibility to cancel any time, people are worried there must be a 'catch'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A friend does something similar in the Netherlands. He's interviews people on their preferences and sending them coffee based on their preferences.

<comment><USER12> Hmm, I might have been a customer of his. It's worth shopping before someone fills the machine with something disgusting like Aroma Rood.. ;)

<comment><USER11> I posted the link in reply to one of the other queries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I will definitely look into this more when I'm back from holiday. Has anyone else found that getting good coffee in Germany is quite difficult? Or is it just that my city (Leipzig) is a bit of a coffee desert?

Anyways. Best wishes, and you will probably find a customer in me!

</comment><comment><USER14> for good tea I really like [https://www.teekampagne.de/en](https://www.teekampagne.de/en)

<comment><USER15> Since cooking and foodstuff seems to be right on topic here at HN, can someone give me a short overview what the differences (practically drinking) between Darjeeling and Assam are?

Beside the obvious geographical difference, of course.

<comment><USER16> Darjeeling is more aromatic and (for a fermented black tea) tastes quite close to a green tea. Assam tastes stronger and is more astringent on the mouth when drunk without milk.

I always imagined that the difference in flavours reflected the different geographies - delicate growth in the Darjeeling hills versus robust growth in the warmer Assam plains. It might also be differences in the way the teas are fermented.

<comment><USER15> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Don't you have to list the base price like price per 100 gram or 1 kilo?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, I'll find that out. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Really great explanations of how to make coffee and how to store it. Thanks!

<comment><USER14> The explanations inspired me to find out more how to make a good espresso. And I found this site, which has some nice articles. [http://www.home- barista.com/](http://www.home-barista.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I stumbled on the link yesterday and decided not to get the subscription. I'm basically okay with having stuff sent to me in regular distances. I also like to try new stuff!

What I dislike is making a subscription to something that I haven't tried yet. So in case I dislike the product, I have to remember to cancel it in order to not get any more of the product that I dislike. That adds a lot of burden in advance to ordering it.

Furthermore, on the page "Jetzt starten" I'd like to select the product(s) first, before entering my personal information.

</comment><comment><USER20> Hey!

In the end of last year I created something like what your doing here (www.hotcoffeeclub.com), also with customers in Germany and also posted it to HN just as you did ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6818369](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6818369)), not sure if you saw it at the time.

About 8 months in I've definitely learned a bunch and I ultimately decided to stop doing it couple of months ago (the website is not run by me anymore). If you'd like to have a chat my email is on my profile.

<comment><USER21> Hi guico, I'd love to chat if you'd be willing. I'm doing something very, very similar and would love to pick your brain!

I'm dpaola2 [at] gmail if you'd be willing to email me :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Trying this out with some Ayichesh :)

I'll actually have to check my mailbox now, usually anything important is sent via DHL and they usually come by twice daily ;)

</comment><comment><USER23> Business model:

1\. Find something people need to buy regularly anyways

2\. Buy a 20$ one page design from themeforrest and modify it

3\. Let people subscribe to the service to send them the item on a regular basis

4\. Hope that enough people are too lazy to just buy things like normal people would do

5\. Repeat the whole business model with every item you normally buy when you do your groceries, like: blacksocks (overpriced socks), mymusli (overpriced cerials) etc.

<comment><USER24> What's wrong with this? If they're delivering coffee German's can't get otherwise, at a fair price for the connivence then it works for everyone. People complain on HN about startups with vague, long term, lofty business models but this is the opposite.

Coffee is different to socks because people that like good coffee won't buy it from anywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I love coffee with a passion! When buying coffee, i usually want to choose the quality/origin, the darkness of the roast and the grind (whole bean or _freshly_ fine-ground).

If i go to $healthfoodstore around the corner i have a variety of high quality, dark roasted whole bean espresso from different regions. I would be tempted to say that the store's prices are almost always lower than your offering _and_ i can smell the 250g bag of bliss before i spend 12eu on it. How do you compete with that? (given that you consider people with my level of coffee-affection your target audience)

Fresh roasted needs to be more than "roasted sometime before we ship it" for me to make a difference.

Offer a subscription, where you put a coffee roaster in my kitchen. Every week you send me $amount of high-quality, well sourced green coffee beans from different regions. I put some of them them in my KBRoaster(tm), push the "dark roast" button, kitchen starts smelling like heaven and only 7 minutes later i enjoy my fresh cup of fresh roasted, fresh ground espresso, directly from a farm on the volcanoes of the guatemalan central highlands! Thanks for the little bag with fermented cacao beans you put into this weeks package together with a note that espresso and pure cacao go well together. If you roast it at your place and ship it dark to me, my kitchen does not smell like heaven in the morning.

Lastly, the grinding process is (imo) where most of the freshness gets lost.[0] Fresh ground is way more important than fresh roasted. Freshl-roasted is only a selling point if you show me that you are actually fresher than $healthfoodstore. Example: provide very fast delivery for the region around your roaster, offering "it's still warm when it arrives" quality.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_roasting#Packaging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_roasting#Packaging)

      Roasted coffee has an optimal typical shelf life
      of 2 weeks, and ground coffee about 15 minutes.

<comment><USER2> _If i go to $healthfoodstore around the corner i have a variety of high quality, dark roasted espresso from different regions. I would be tempted to say that the store 's prices are almost always lower than your offering_

Good point. The coffee they sell is much more upmarket than what you can get at $healthfoodstore, but the site doesn't make it clear. The beans they use are more expensive, and they are probably roasted more carefully. Grocery store brands typically use an industrial high-volume and high-temperature roasting process, instead of small batches and lower temperatures. If you need 2 tons, would you rather do 100 batches of 20kgs for 20 minutes each, or one large batch in only 10 minutes?

Phoenix Coffee Roasters are transparent about their costs [0], they pay up to 4 times of the regular exchange price for green beans:

 _We purchased this coffee for USD 10,60 /kg through Nordic Approach. At the same time the stock exchange price for green coffee was 2,50 EUR/kg, for Faire Trade certificated coffee 3,00 EUR/kg. Our production costs (taxes, transportation, packaging, etc.) mount up to 7,50 EUR/kg roasted coffee. Our overall costs are 15,80 EUR/kg, plus labour costs and VAT._ (These beans sell for 35.30 EUR/kg)

Maybe a line like "coffee from Germany's best roasters" would make some people interested.

 _I put some of them them in my KBRoaster(tm), push the "dark roast" button, kitchen starts smelling like heaven and only 7 minutes later i enjoy my fresh cup of fresh roasted, fresh ground espresso_

Have you done this before? Your kitchen will smell like hell and your fire alarm might go off ;-) Also, you should wait a few days for the beans to release all the CO2 from roasting.

 _Roasted coffee has an optimal typical shelf life of 2 weeks_

Citation needed :-) I'd say it's best between the second and eight week.

[0] [http://www.phoenix-coffeeroasters.com/en/red.html](http://www.phoenix- coffeeroasters.com/en/red.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's all in German for me. Is there a language switch somewhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Spindritf, sorry, we don't have an English site yet, as we currently only deliver within Germany. I'd be glad to help you with any questions though, just ask here or send me an email to firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER27> You guys would do _great_ in Sweden. We consume loads of coffee and there is a large following of coffee - we even have a national time for coffee and bakeries called 'fika'. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's great to hear :) I love coffee from Sweden, some of the swedish roasters/cafés are very high on my to do list for my next short trip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've been a customer of Green Cup Coffee. Do you know them? I have no subscription (don't think they offer that) and just order whenever I need some new coffee though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I know them! Their roast is quite different from what our roasters usually do. You should give us a try :) You can cancel your subscription anytime without notice. You'll get 20% off your first three packs with the code 'hackernews'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wish we wouldn't have a deal with the coffe machine reseller where we have to take their coffe... This would have been great.

Gute Idee! Werde es weitersagen :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice, thanks und danke :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> That seems rather pricey even for specialty coffee. I usually buy at a great small roastery here in Vienna and 500g of coffee usually go for 10-15€.

<comment><USER2> 40 EUR/kg nothing unusual for "specialty coffee" as understood by the SCAA. Specialty means the best possible quality, without any defects in smell or taste.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> What is your USP compared to Coffee Circle (except for the subscription part)?

<comment><AUTHOR> We offer coffees from a couple of German specialty roasters (currently Bonanza/Berlin and JB/Schwabhausen with a couple more coming soon), so we have a much greater variety.

Apart from that, our focus really lies on convenience for the customer. That means letterbox-friendly packages, outstanding customer support and additional value through recommendations. For example, we can advise you a coffee based on your brew method.

<comment><USER32> We are a Coffee Circle customer at our startup and your only real differentiation from CC are the letterbox-friendly packages. I assume this means 350g or less? Nevertheless, good idea, but it will be expensive for you ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Marius, yeah, we ship 250g packages!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> You had me at "coffee."

</comment><comment><USER34> Fair pricing and two thumbs up for your shipping concept.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks tckr!</comment></comment>


Aaron Swartz Gets Indicted on More Charges in Connection with MIT Break In - <AUTHOR> http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/11/17/aaron-swartz-gets-indicted-on-more-charges-in-connection-with-mit-break-in/ <comment><USER2> "He has apparently settled with JSTOR but not with U.S. prosecutors who indicted Swartz on charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer."

Everyone theoretically "harmed" by his downloading of the material (all of which was available for free through the MIT Guest wireless network, just at lower speed) has put the incident behind them, but the feds believe their mandate is to nail his ass to the wall.

That's not the Academy's fault, and every free person should be pissed about it.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, isn't that how criminal law generally works? Once you report a crime (or the authorities find out somehow), can't you still be prosecuted even if the victims say it's "no big deal"?

<comment><USER4> Yes, though in reality, it doesnt happen often because it is difficult to build a case without the primary witness.

<comment><USER5> I may be misconstruing what you're saying (please correct me if I am), but I don't see how MIT's and JSTOR's dismissing of the case makes them any less "primary witness material", should the authorities decide to continue prosecuting.

<comment><USER4> No you construed correctly...I think it has to do with the nature of the charges being pressed here. The feds can build a case in which there is discrete factual evidence. Either the logs show Swartz's activity or they do not. Either the computer closet was broken into or it was not. Either those documents were on Swartz's computer or they were not.

None of those facts require MIT or JSTOR to testify. A charge related to a denial-of-service, _would_ require the cooperation of a victim...I _assume_...because if the "victim" isn't going to say that their network was terribly inconvenienced, then it's a hard case to prosecute.

The feds may be pursuing this hard because even if JSTOR doesn't care, there may be many people (i.e. the authors of the journal articles) who feel ripped off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "My bet? Swartz is forcing the issue". My bet is that the Justice Department is still pissed at him for his role in liberating PACER (see <http://gnat.me/sJAdUm>). They'd been obstinately keeping judicial information under paywall lock and key, and were grumpy when he helped release that information (read the link for more). The FBI staked him out, and this set of indictments (where MIT and JSTOR have both made their peace with Swartz) reeks of vindictiveness. Anyone else, they'd have let it go by now.

<comment><USER7> I can't help but wonder if it also has something to do with DemandProgress.org. Aaron's group is one of the more effective pro-privacy, anti-wiretapping/snooping/etc. advocates around.

Efforts like this are particularly problematic for the massively growing US security apparatus:

<http://act.demandprogress.org/letter/snooping_bill/>

<comment><USER8> So a guy who's anti-wiretapping and anti-snooping snuck into a building, snuck into a wire closet, installed a computer, and sucked data down onto it.

No, nothing contradictory about that. Move along.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's cases like these that make Academia seem like such an antiquated idea. The fact that institutions support the locking away of research, much of which paid for by public funds and written by authors that intended fair use of their information, reeks of hypocrisy. The fact that no one in academia has spoke up on this case is damming to say the least. We as a society really need to rapidly come to the conclusion that not everything need be for a buck, especially when that something was paid for already via public funds and the true creators of that content never intended for these lech quasi-Academia organization, to be able to milk their work for generations.

<comment><USER10> "The fact that no one in academia has spoke up on this case is damming to say the least."

I'm an academic and I think it's a load of rubbish. Where are you getting your facts?

<comment><USER9> I have seen no media coverage of anyone at MIT or elsewhere condemning the prosecution of Aaron. Nor have I seen any renowned individual of academia, at any point, blog, pod-cast, or via lecture condemn the prosecution of Aaron, just because one may think it is rubbish does not mean that they have given their voice to the subject. The fact is there has been silence on the issue, and that fact is derived from the silence, not from a human or media source. If I am wrong I would love to be corrected, but I have not, to this date, seen anyone of notoriety from MIT speak up.

<comment><USER10> So which is it? Academics, or a notorious MIT professor?

You're blaming the problem on completely the wrong party to begin with. Academic researchers are getting screwed by groups like JSTOR on a regular basis. There are gorram huge movements in academia dedicated to working on this problem. You're blaming the people who are actually doing the most to try to fix this.

<comment><USER11> Well, to be fair, who is "Academia"? Is it the professors? Is it the administrations? Is it the whole system, including universities (and all of their issues down to football team scandals), publishers, college admissions tests, and so on?

The thing is, there is a fairly substantial system set up around academia. It includes people who run conferences, publishers, school administrators, endowments, students, admissions, government grants, private grants, standardized testing, and more. There is a lot of it that is fairly nasty.

Sure, there can be a few professors who object to some parts of it; but that doesn't mean that the system as a whole isn't sick. Has there been any serious institutional pushback against this prosecution?

I think that part of the the problem is that the people who matter the most in academia (the professors and the students) have lost their voice to the "industry" of academia; the administrations, publishers, the grant funding bodies, and other people who have a vested financial interest in the system, but who aren't the main producers or consumers of the value of academia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Those new charges being: "...Breaking and Entering with Intent to Commit a Felony, Larceny over $250, and Unauthorized Access to a Computer Network..."

[http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/news/x1655830732/Reddit...](http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/news/x1655830732/Reddit- co-founder-indicted-in-connection-with-breaking-into-MIT-server- room#axzz1e0Ok1QTk)

The earlier charges being: Wire Fraud, Computer Fraud, Unlawfully Obtaining Information from a Protected Computer, and Recklessly Damaging a Protected Computer.

[http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/217117-united- states-...](http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/217117-united-states-of- america-v-aaron-swartz)

</comment><comment><USER13> :( Keep on fighting the good fight, aaronsw.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wire fraud is a big one. Maximum of $1000000 fine and/or 30 years in prison.

</comment><comment><USER15> Link appears broken as of now, FYI... (1:00 AM EST)

</comment><comment><USER16> Is this data downloadable somewhere?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think that hits it right on. Academia is as entrenched as most any powerful copyright holder.

</comment><comment><USER17> Who is representing him? Lessig?

<comment><USER18> In the words of Michael Clayton, "you need a trial lawyer".

<comment><USER19> If I were him, I'd want Jennifer Granick on my team.

<comment><USER20> Granick sold out a long time ago. She works for HBGary now. If I recall correctly the whole e-mail dump revealed her to be the backstabbing twit she is.

<comment><USER19> She is a lawyer. Her highest professional responsibility is to her clients. I don't consider a great lawyer who defends a murderer to have the same morals as the murderer, and without quality representation, justice can't be done.

I have met her on many occasions and she has always been competent and helpful.

<comment><USER17> Apologies for nitpicking, but actually as a lawyer her highest responsibility is to the court. Secondary to that is her obligation to her client. The reason for this should be self-evident.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What caused heroku traffic to spike with compete? - <AUTHOR> http://siteanalytics.compete.com/heroku.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Here are the quantcast numbers:

<http://www.quantcast.com/heroku.com>

Here are the alexa numbers:

<http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/heroku.com>

I know people don't give credence to compete.com but I'm curious if anyone has any theories on why this happened. Also the quantcast numbers also indicate almost a tripling in traffic starting back in August.</comment>


How to overcome "Entrepreneur's block" - <AUTHOR> http://www.nico.im/post/26631664931/how-to-overcome-entrepreneurs-block

<comment><USER2> This article is ridiculous..

1st There is no such thing as 'non-creatives'. Everyone is creative, it's how they are, not how much they are.

2nd Coming up with ideas without a problem is the biggest problem with startups, designers, and creatives everywhere. It's a big reason why they fail and aren't sure why, and it wastes time and energy. The reason you and others can't or have a hard time coming up with ideas is because YOU DONT HAVE A PROBLEM!

3rd There is a formula for creativity: C=fa(K _I_ E) Creativity = the function of an Attitude x Knowledge x Imagination x ability to Evaluate.

4th The best problems come from experiences, so being curious (to increase your knowledge) and doing things you have never done, not like ping-pong (although I do enjoy it) nor walks on the beach, help you find new problems and actually feel and understand them.

5th Once you have these problems, ask why at least 5 times and make sure you have the real problem. The worst scenario is trying to solve the wrong problem, which also leads to lots of failed (and learned from) solutions.

6th Once you feel like you really have the right problem, begin solving it (now it's time for IDEAS). Write your problem down, and DIVERGE!!! This means that instead of coming up with an idea, talking about it, deciding on it, then moving onto the next one, you should DIVERGE and come up with as many possible solutions as you can, without thinking about whether they are good or bad. If you are by yourself, its called ideating, if you're with others it's brainstorming. Either way DEFER JUDGEMENT. Turn your filter off until later, on your own ideas, and others'. Write everything down. You can judge them all later (converging).

7th It helps to practice diverging and creativity, it's like working out. The parts in your brain that help you come up with solve problems/come up with ideas get better at it te more you do it. You can practice on problems like: what might be all the uses for a brick, or all the ways you might change a bathtub, or all of the uses for 10,000 left handed gloves.

8th Know that per problem, if you truly want to solve it, you will spend at least an hour just diverging. Understand that it (on average) takes over 30 minutes to get past those "low-hanging fruit" ideas and get to the good ones, thats the time where you're like "I can't come up with any more". If you keep pushing through you will!

A few tools/rules for diverging: 1\. Defer Judgement (on your ideas, and others) 2\. Build on Ideas (and let others build on you) 3\. Wild and Crazy is OK (my favorite, GO CRAZY on solutions. It's always easier to take a crazy idea and make it more realistic, than it is a simple idea and make it crazier/better) 4\. Quantity = Quality (the more ideas you have, the better ideas you will have after converging, ie 10 ideas you might have one good one, 100 ideas you will definitely have at least 10 good ones)

I'm new at this, and the people I have learned from and those they learned from do much crazier things than I do, and here's an example of something I have run and how these tools can help: I've worked with people that had 7 ideas in an hour, and the next hour I helped them (just facilitated, no ideas from me) get them to 400 in the same time frame. Same people, same problem, just new insight on different ways to solve problems and brainstorm together.

These ideas have been studied and research for 60 years, have continued to get better, and are practiced all over the world. They always give badass results and change lives! Learn more here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_problem_solving>

Check out:

Gregg Fraley: <http://greggfraley.com> International Problem Solving Facilitator and Author (We (<http://reubenandhunter.com>) designed that one)

Nathan Schwagler: Teaches Creativity and Innovation at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg and is the creative-in-residence for the entrepreneurship major, he also has a masters in creative problem solving from Buffalo State (where these processes have been studied and taught since the beginning) <http://www.linkedin.com/in/schwagler>

ME! After commenting here I think I'm going to start my own blog, as much as I dislike writing, I hear it's the best way to get better :) <http://reubenpressman.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> Gosh, you are one of these designers who think of themselves higher than those "non creative people":

"We would write those ideas the "non-creative" people gave us on a white board [...] That list was called "The obvious list""

<comment><USER4> "...so obvious that even an accountant could come up with." Very condescending.

<comment><USER5> As an accountant, I fully agree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I dont like the language, but i do like the essence of going after people who have different mindsets / background / work for a fresher start.

</comment><comment><USER7> I found the post interesting. Just curious what are some examples of jumping laterally vs lineally with an idea?

</comment><comment><USER8> Thirt comment.</comment>


How Web 2.0 friendly is the Wii's Opera browser? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wiiwii.tv/2007/04/12/how-web-20-friendly-is-the-wiis-opera-browser/ <comment><USER2> Is isn't it more Web 2.0's job to be Wii-friendly?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are some sites who have special wii versions available such as: <http://www.finetune.com/wii/>

<comment><USER3> Wow that finetune wii interface rocks.</comment></comment></comment>