Humor: Worst Captcha Ever - <AUTHOR> http://depressedprogrammer.wordpress.com/2008/04/20/worst-captcha-ever/ Wow.  That is a stunningly bad captcha.  Just really bad ... I sometimes wonder how these things went from trying to solve a simple problem, to creating unusable provisioning processes for users everywhere... <comment><USER2> I got one where the clue was, "People who annoy you".

</comment><comment><USER3> It's even for a human to recognize that stuff. I usually get the captchas wrong a few times before getting it right, I supose that it'll be even worse if people start doing that.

</comment><comment><USER4> Even worse: A partial derivative captcha

<http://brad.livejournal.com/2331278.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> It looks like somebody trying to be clever. It's an obfuscation of the word 'pussy'

</comment><comment><USER6> All Captchas should have animals in them</comment>


Sounds like hype: there's scant evidence 'binaural beats' relaxes your brain - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/sounds-like-hype-theres-scant-evidence-the-binaural-beats-illusion-relaxes-your-brain-132197 <comment><USER2> The Science is clear from the article:

"We also know that brain entrainment is a genuine effect that can occur in response to particular rhythmic frequencies perceived by our senses. A deep- pitched musical tone or a lightbulb flickering a few times a second can indeed cause your brain cells to start firing at the same frequency."

"the researchers [found] that binaural beats can elicit "cross-frequency connectivity", in which the brain coordinates its activity across different types of brain waves." [and] "a recent analysis of 35 studies demonstrated a modest effect on attention, memory, anxiety and pain perception."

"They found that both binaural and monaural beats can entrain the brain to their particular frequency. But when they asked participants to describe any changes to their mood, they found that neither types of sound had any significant effect."

So the factors we can measure, brain frequency, and entrainment are conclusively proven. What was not proved, was when subjects were asked to self-assess their mood, they reported "[no] change to mood" and since entrainment is something that occurs over multiple minutes, it would be expected that the subject would have difficulty quantifying the change.

The factors as far as mood, shows this study should have selected for other criteria in determining mood adjustments than simple assessment by the subject.</comment>


Trigram indexes or How Google code search worked - <AUTHOR> http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html

<comment><USER2> Predators hunting randomly spaced prey should not themselves move randomly.</comment>


Hummingbirds see UV light invisible to humans - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/different-wavelengths-science-finds-hummingbirds-see-ultraviolet-light-invisible-to-humans-11594688179 <comment><AUTHOR> [https://archive.vn/7Sqxg](https://archive.vn/7Sqxg)</comment>


Ask HN: Experiences with retargeting? - <AUTHOR>

I'm thinking of making the plunge into retargeting campaigns. It seems like AdRoll and Retargeter may be my best bets. It concerns me that Retargeter charges a flat fee and that their website doesn't give any details about estimated # of impressions or clicks. Anyway - you all have any experience with this? <comment><USER2> I strongly suggest that you locate a retargetting company that operates purely on a Cost Per Acquisiton (CPA) model. There are enough high quality firms out there that use this model that it makes no sense what so ever to pay a flat fee. However you must watch out for view through conversions. I recommend you hit this article:

[http://www.adoperationsonline.com/2010/02/25/retargeting- exp...](http://www.adoperationsonline.com/2010/02/25/retargeting-experts- mediaforge-launches-post-engagement-platform-to-accurately-track-metrics/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Make the plunge. I recommend AdRoll (though it's my baby, so I must admit I'm biased). As for second opinion, a large number of YC companies also run retargeting through us.

We provide great ROI bang for buck and charge transparently on a CPM or CPC. You can setup a campaign in under 5 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER4> While I don't know much about retargeting, I've met Arjun, the founder of Retargeter, and he's one hard working dude. Really believes in what he offers so I'd be comfortable recommending doing business with him.</comment>


Show HN: Market your product to 1m+ journalists - <AUTHOR> http://meansheep.com <comment><USER2> Safari, Brave and Duck Duck Go browser fails to connect the server, but Mozilla did.

</comment><comment><USER3> Should be worded as: Pay us to help you spam journalist

</comment><comment><USER4> want to check it out but not mobile friendly.

<comment><AUTHOR> correct, still working on the mobile friendly layout, thanks for the comment though

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Will you remove journalists that have never given consent to be added to your spam database?

Sounds like a good GDPR court case to me :)</comment>


The Paradox of Choice: The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/science/26tier.html?ex=1361682000&en=d63c4602c083c62d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> There is a startup equivalent to destroying your retreat options (from "How not to die"):

 _I wish every startup we funded could appear in a Newsweek article describing them as the next generation of billionaires, because then none of them would be able to give up. The success rate would be 90%. I'm not kidding._

<comment><USER3> I definitely tell people I'm going to be working on a startup over the summer to force myself to do it. It's a surprisingly effective method actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Jesus, this is so weird. I've been spending the last few weeks trying to articulate a theory about the illusion of choice being used as a framework for power (can you tell by that statement I haven't quite figured it out just yet?).

The discussion yesterday (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123081>) about how to break out of paradigms and the Paradox of Choice are closely tied together with the idea I'm working on.

<comment><AUTHOR> See also (where I got the more descriptive phrase in the title): <http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/93> [http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More- Less/dp/006000...](http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More- Less/dp/0060005688)

To me, it also ties in with embodiment theory (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123243>). We think we'd rather have the buffet, especially on first sight and with an empty stomach. But after gorging ourselves we realize we would have much rather had one really good dish than twenty mediocre ones.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you. What I'm more interested in however, is who really gets to say what dishes are on the buffet? The cooks? The consumers? My gut tells me the consumers have a lot less choice than it appears.

<comment><AUTHOR> If it's your restaurant, you do! Now, if you want to stay in business better to offer a few dishes (not a buffet) that people would kill to eat delivered by cooks who love great, simple food.

(And yes, we can run with this line of thought all day. Mmmmmmm, embodiment.)

<comment><USER5> Ah, the Jobsian theory of restaurants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised by the war analogies. Withdrawals are an essential part of military strategy.

<comment><USER7> It is a good analogy. During WWII the soviet red army got smashed at the beginning by the germans, and was in retread (lost a lot of men and equipment). Millions of soldiers were captured. Hitler gave the order to summary execute all commanders and communist members found in each unit.

Meanwhile, Stalin, pissed at the poor performance of its army, gave order to execute all the commanders who retreated, or their units gave up to the germans.

Giving up, ment certain death, retreating ment execution, so the red army commanders; from simple captains, to even generals, were left with literally one choice: Fight to their death.

At the end, we all know who won the war.

<comment><USER8> That's a piss poor understanding of history.

The only thing that turned the tide of the war for the Russians was winter. Stalin's kill 'em all approach had virtually no effect on the performance of his army. In fact, Hitler's fight 'til the death orders ended up being laughed at my German commanders.

When you're a nazi choosing to surrender to Stalin's red army, you understand the true meaning of death.

<comment><USER7> "That's a piss poor understanding of history. The only thing that turned the tide of the war for the Russians was winter. Stalin's kill 'em all approach had virtually no effect on the performance of his army. "

First of all, your "That's a piss poor understanding of history." is a pretty crappy comment for a forum like this that wants to stay civil. I hope you choose better wording and are not like this with your friends, and colleagues.

Second, attributing the defeat of nazis to weather, is trivalizing the whole history. I am not saying Stalin's orders to not surrender won the war, but it was a huge factor on the battle field, while you say it had no effect.

BBC - The Battle For Russia <http://joox.net/cat/44/id/1971071>

The nazis caught almost 2 million soviet prisoners in the first part of the war. Imagine those people actually haven't given up, but fought to death, then the outnumbered nazi machine would have never reached so close to Moscow (16 miles). One of the reason, after the war, a lot of ex-soviet prisoners, were treated really bad, almost as traitors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Engage in combat fully determined to die and you will be alive; wish to survive in the battle and you will surely meet death."

Uesugi Kenshin (1530—1578)

Applies equally to war & startups.

</comment><comment><USER10> That experiment sounds too funny - I think I would panic, too, if doors suddenly started shrinking away.

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly, to me it's perfectly explained by embodiment theory. A disappearing door would seem to literally lock you in. Probably where their paradigm needs more testing. Would the results hold if instead giftboxes were shrinking away?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> And how does this apply to UI design? (What is the optimal number of ways to do something, 1, many, or something in between?)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the choice is to give as few as possible. Not only will that help minimize development time, but you can always add based on what users demand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting... I find that sometimes, I am relieved when my choices shrink, or put another way, some choices are made for me.

</comment><comment><USER13> (Wish they would open a door) free open access to the site

</comment><comment><USER14> Intresting. I thought Cortez initiated this stradegy</comment>


Foundations of ML and AI: Book recommendations - <AUTHOR> https://dragan.rocks/articles/18/Programmers-Teach-Yourself-Foundations-of-ML-AI-With-These-X-Books <comment><USER2> Original title: Programmer, Teach Yourself Foundations of ML and AI with these 6 Books

Books:

\- Ian Hacking - Introduction to probability and Inductive Logic

\- John Kruschke - Doing Bayesian Data Analysis

\- Gareth Williams - Linear Algebra with Applications, Alternate Edition

\- Matthew Scarpino - OpenCL in Action

\- Michael Nielsen - Neural Networks and Deep Learning

\- Goodfellow, Bengio, and Courville - Deep Learning

<comment><USER3> How to teach yourself ML in two easy steps

1) Have a strong knowledge of undergraduate mathematics, probability, statistics, numerics

2) read a book about machine learning

<comment><USER4> Piggybacking on this, I instead recommend an introductory ML book like Bishop or Murphy, a statistical ML book like Mohri or Shai Shalev-Schwartz, and a textbook on nonlinear optimization, convex or otherwise.

The jump from classical machine learning to deep learning is not far if you have a good understanding of first principles.

<comment><USER5> Any reason to pick Mohri over Shai Shalev-Schwartz, or the other way around?

<comment><USER4> I think that SSS is a little easier to follow, while Mohri is more complete.

It was helpful to me to have both, as details skipped over in one proof were often highlighted or better explained in its corresponding description. For someone whose training was not theoretical computer science, SSS left me with a better understanding most of the time.

<comment><USER5> Great, I'll start with SSS. Any tips for a good optimization book to read afterwards?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pattern Recogntion and Machine Learning by Bishop

I'm highly skeptical of lists that do not include this standard text.

<comment><USER4> PRML was my introductory textbook, and it's excellent. (The neural network chapters are a quite good introduction.) I also hear good things about Kevin Murphy's text, which brings a more Bayesian approach and is preferred by some instructors I know, but I've never used it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think that before going into ML and AI it's worth to understand how to perform the quantitative analysis end-to-end. ML/AI would be just one of the process steps there, but without the bigger picture, you miss the value of it.

One of the good books to understand the quantitative analysis is "Keeping Up with Quants" [https://www.amazon.com.au/Keeping-Up-Quants-Understanding- An...](https://www.amazon.com.au/Keeping-Up-Quants-Understanding-Analytics- ebook/dp/B00B0SA1LY)

</comment><comment><USER8> Whatever happened to Norvig's AIMA book [1], did it fall out of fashion? I don't ever see it mentioned in these kind of posts nowadays.

Perhaps is because it doesn't cover deep learning?

1: [http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/](http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/)

<comment><USER9> I believe there's a new edition in prep.

<comment><USER8> Got it. Found these (old) pointers online:

[https://www.quora.com/When-will-the-4th-edition-of- Artificia...](https://www.quora.com/When-will-the-4th-edition-of-Artificial- Intelligence-A-Modern-Approach-be-released)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/5pzfzs/artifici...](https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/5pzfzs/artificial_intelligence_a_modern_approach_4th/dg0054h/)

Haven't found any recent updates yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks cool!</comment>


Non-English-based programming languages - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages <comment><USER2> Create a non-English based programming language is very different from translating a english programming language. Different languages have different ways to express time, state, etc. If one translates a english programming language, it will be a translated English based programming language (not a Non-English base...)

I`m a native portuguese speaker, for example. In portuguese, we "break" the "to be" verb in two forms: The "ser" verb to denominate an immutable state like "The sun is hot" and a "estar" verb to denominate a transitory state "It is hot today".

My guess is that, if programming languages were made since the beginning with a language like that, the coding world would be a more pleasant place today. Things like differenciate mutable/immutable state would be much more natural.

So, it`s possible even to create a Non-English based programming language IN English. Russian, japanese, etc. languages have their peculiarities, that could shape coding very different than what it is today.

Ruby it`s a nice example of it. Just google about the subject, and found this material ([http://blog.new-bamboo.co.uk/2010/12/17/learning-japanese- th...](http://blog.new-bamboo.co.uk/2010/12/17/learning-japanese-th...))

Any rubyist-japanese-speaker who would like to give some thoughts on the subject?

<comment><USER3> Interesting article, maybe a bit far-fetched towards the end. Correct link:

[http://blog.new-bamboo.co.uk/2010/12/17/learning-japanese- th...](http://blog.new-bamboo.co.uk/2010/12/17/learning-japanese-the-rubyist- way)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I ended up on the (Chinese-language) page for 丙正正¹, a Chinese C++ variant. There was a code example, which I ran through Google Translate to see what would happen. The result is surprisingly readable (and obviously a C-family language)²:

      Empty chess file :: set comments (character * s, integer n)
        {
             If (n> = maximum number of comments)
             For (; maximum number of annotations <= n; maximum number of comments + +)
                     Comment [Maximum number of annotations] = NONE;
             If (s == NULL or the string length (s) == 0)
                      Returns;
             If (annotation [n]! = NONE)
                      Delete Comment [n];
             Comment [n] = new character [string length (s) +1];
             String Copy (annotation [n], s);
        }

¹ [http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%99%E6%AD%A3%E6%AD%A3](http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%99%E6%AD%A3%E6%AD%A3)

² empty where one might expect void, character, for, string, &c.

<comment><USER5> Now that's just fucking horrifying. D:

I have a translation of "Design of the Unix Operating System" in Chinese, and take great comfort in the fact that I can still get the gist of all the source code listings--even despite the comments in Chinese.

I admire the simplicity of the grammar in Chinese (from the year I took of it in college), but honestly I find logographic languages are kind of gross.

EDIT:

Fine, fine, I admit it: a language with millenia of cruft is totally reasonable to use as the way of persisting the cruftiest programming language in the world.

Indeed, the same years of hard study that are required to write and read Chinese literately should be added onto the same years of study required to write and read C++ reliably.

This is such a comically bad and obtuse idea I think we should propose it as the next draft standard.

EDIT2:

Look, explain your downvotes (in the language of your choice!). My opinion is simply that alphabetic languages (here exemplified by English) are superior to logographic languages--mostly because they require knowing fewer characters.

I may be grossly misunderstanding Chinese here; as claimed, my schooling in it is limited.

<comment><USER6> Chinese characters (and similar writing systems) do have certain advantages versus alphabetic systems though. The smallest unit of writing has more information embedded in it. You've got a decent chance of guessing the meaning of a compound word if you know some of the characters in it, though not necessarily the pronunciation. With alphabets, it's reversed, if you know all of the pieces of a word, pronunciation is usually simple, but meaning not necessarily so (especially in English). As a result, the written language is more dense, and can actually be read more quickly.

Finally, with an appropriate method, it doesn't have to take years to learn enough characters to write and read literately, I can read Japanese at a high school level, and I've been at it for a year and a half.

<comment><USER5> So, Japanese is a uniquely bad example here, right?

As I understand it, there are three alphabets: kanji (lots of Chinese characters), katakana, and hiragana. The latter two are used to spell out the syllables of words, in some sense acting like an alphabetic language. Kanji seems to have a thousand or two characters in use, whereas katakana and hiragana have around fifty.

Beyond looking up stroke numbers and radicals, I found dictionary usage for Chinese characters somewhat hard--English lets you basically do a very easy binary search on a word (start at most significant character, find section, move to next most significant character, etc.).

<comment><USER6> Bad in what way exactly? Hiragana and Katakana are easier to pick up, because there is more burden placed in learning each individual word. With the baseline investment to learn the Kanji in place, each new word is just a composition of characters and their associated ideas that you already know.

You can do the same thing with dictionaries in Japanese or Chinese, though it works best if you use a dictionary that lets you handwrite in the characters (it helps a lot if you learn your radicals and stroke orders well, so that you can easily write characters you don't know).

<comment><USER5> Oh, so, my point was that using Japanese was a bad example, precisely because two of the three alphabets are used nonlogographically. It is also my understanding that new words and loanwords are spelled out phonetically in those alphabets, instead of grafting some new character into the kanji.

 _" if you use a dictionary that lets you handwrite in the character"_

I'm unfamiliar with any paper dictionary with that capability.

<comment><USER6> I mostly use the dictionary on my phone. I can get by with a paper one, but it's a bit slower.

<comment><USER5> Technology is very handy nowadays. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Perl – While Perl's keywords and function names are generally in English, it > allows modification of its parser to modify the input language, such as in > Damian Conway's Lingua::Romana::Perligata module, which allows programs to > be written in Latin or his Lingua::tlhInganHol::yIghun Perl language in > Klingon. They do not just change the keywords but also the grammar to match > the language. That's impressive

<comment><USER7> As an example just how far they go, the statement:

clavis hashus nominamentum da.

Is equivalent to [1]:

@keys = keys %hash;

And in Klingon Perl [2]:

De'pu'wI' bIH yInob!

Is equivalent to:

%data = @_;

[1] [https://metacpan.org/module/DCONWAY/Lingua-Romana- Perligata-...](https://metacpan.org/module/DCONWAY/Lingua-Romana- Perligata-0.50/lib/Lingua/Romana/Perligata.pm)

[2] [https://metacpan.org/module/Lingua::tlhInganHol::yIghun](https://metacpan.org/module/Lingua::tlhInganHol::yIghun)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it's an awful idea. Let's take Cyrillic languages, Ukrainian/Russian as an example.

* Alphabet has 33+ letters, so there is no space left for programmer's favorite symbols on layout: @#$^&{}[]|~`<>. Yep.

* In Math variables' names traditionally are Latin/Greek letters, Cyrillic is used only when teaching kids. Again: switching layout all the time? No, thanks.

* Words are simply much longer. And I mean much. In English even short words tend to become shorter (variable -> var). In Russian there is simply no such pattern exists. `var-set` -> `установить-переменную`. `var-get` - `получить-переменную`.

* Words are stable in English morphologically. e.g. `last-msg-delivered` - `last-msgS-delivered` -> `последнЕЕ-сообщениЕ-доставленО` - `последнИЕ-сообщениЯ-доставленЫ` - if you change gender or from singular to plural etc you should change few words in a row.

Seriously, it seems to me like trying to make things more complicated.

<comment><USER9> I have 104 keys on my keyboard and 4 of them are modifiers. The English alphabet isn't the Latin/Greek alphabet either. And I am absolutely astounded that Russians apparently have never invented the concept of an abbreviation or contraction.

One does wonder how soviets ever managed to program their computers.

<comment><USER10> As an aside, if you (the reader, not Avshalom) haven't read much Russian literature, Russian is the language where you take the first syllable of every word in a long phrase and you make a new word:

Министерство здравоохранения => Минздрав (Ministry of Health => Minheal)

Министерство юстиции => Минюст (Ministry of Justice => Minjust)

etc, etc. As a foreigner, I found that quite peculiar though it doesn't seem to be as common now as it was before but it's still noticeable in everyday life.

<comment><USER11> Ah, so that's where that came from in 1984. It all makes sense.

<comment><USER8> Yes, it is indeed inspired by that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My rather simplistic view: as a native Portuguese speaker, I strongly refute the idea of programming languages (and even coding) in a language other than English. Besides the obvious reasons (globalized world, outsourcing, multinational corporations, etc), English is much less expressive than the Romance languages [1], which makes it a better formal language.

1 - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages)

<comment><USER13> I think you'd have a very difficult time convincing a serious linguist that English is less expressive than the Romance languages.

<comment><USER14> Especially because when English is less expressive than a Romance language, we steal those words from the Romance language until we're at least as expressive.

<comment><USER2> But it`s much easier to create new words in english. Like transform a verb in a noum, or adjective, etc

I`m a native portuguese speaker, and think that romantic languages can be more "emotional" than english. But its amazing how a new idea can be expressed so easilly in English.

<comment><USER15> I'd contend the opposite, being fluent in German, English and having strong knowledge of Latin.

German and Latin can create new words or ideas much easier than English can. English creates them 'easier' by wholesale importing them. Take the concept of 'karma', there is no word for this in English. In German this word is schicksal. This concept doesn't exist in English at all other than the Hindi import.

<comment><USER16> English does like to import words wholesale, and I agree that German conjunctions and the fact you can often create new words by combining two different words (my favourite: "scheinheilig"="apparently+holy"=hypocrite) makes it easy to create new words in German (and other Germanic languages).

That said, your example is not a very good one. "Schicksal" can be translated as "fate", "fortune", "destiny" and "lot". Not just "karma".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When I write code, it's code. I don't read it like a human readable text. Because of that, I don't really care what it reads when I try to read it as a human readable text.

For example I don't even think about what it would mean in English if I write

         while(true){ i++; if(i>100) break; }

I'm curious if native English speakers look at code as real English text sometimes? It should be funny, because when I translate my code to my native language(word-by-word) it's just meaningless and funny.

<comment><USER18> For things like "while", "do", "return", "public", "private" I definitely think of it as "real English text".

For things like "for", "wend" (while-end), "class", "switch", "main", they're divorced enough from any real English meaning that I just think of them as arbitrary coding words.

So, it's kind of both, at least for me.

<comment><USER5> esac anyone? :P

<comment><USER19> fi

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> An ambition of mine is a programming language where the program structure is decoupled from its visual/textual appearance (model-view separation). One nice result of this scheme is, for example, you could work on a program in English and another person could collaborate on the exact same source in French.

Although I suspect that if this did get written and translated around a lot, many non-English speakers would still pick the English surface syntax due to network effects...

(Edited for clarity)

<comment><USER21> AppleScript works like this. When you save a script it's compiled down to a system representation, and when you reopen it it's transformed back into the english script language. This means:

* Formatting isn't preserved and the file is retabbed each time you save it.

* Earlier versions had French and Japanese compilers/decompilers

* Each application can add AppleScript syntax (like VBA/OLE or whatever). If a script uses commands for an application you don't have installed, you see the raw FourCC codes in the code instead.

It's actually a quite interesting language. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript)

<comment><USER22> TI-Basic 68k (the one used on the TI-89, TI-92, and Voyage 200 series calculators) also does this, except formatting is preserved.

It also uses the same file type for tokenized and untokenized programs: untokenized programs are tokenized when run, and tokenized programs are untokenized when opened with the built-in text editor. Short of opening the file with some external program like a hex editor, there's no way to tell whether the program is tokenized or not. Which, of course, can cause problems if you send an untokenized program to a calculator set to a different language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> But I think there is only one programming environment that supports multiple natural languages. Lucio's (a friend of mine ) turtleacademy.com.

The turtle academy is a programming environment with lessons for teaching kids logo.

For professional programming, a non-english programming language is just a curiosity, non of them has ever gained global traction nor will probably gain.

For kids, for learning, supporting multiple languages is a must.

English: [http://turtleacademy.com/lang/en](http://turtleacademy.com/lang/en)

Russian: [http://turtleacademy.com/lang/ru](http://turtleacademy.com/lang/ru)

Hebrew : [http://turtleacademy.com/lang/he](http://turtleacademy.com/lang/he)

Spanish: [http://turtleacademy.com/lang/es](http://turtleacademy.com/lang/es)

Chinese: [http://turtleacademy.com/lang/zh](http://turtleacademy.com/lang/zh)

And we are looking for volunteers to translate to further languages.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have a dual language database publishing system and I use English and German as a language source. While the obvious advantage of using english as lingua franca, I tend to use my mother tongue (German) system. It feels a bit more natural to me and it's really nice to use in presentations to non-technical people. It seems as if the barrier to use the language is much lower than it is when the programming language is English.

[http://speedata.github.io/publisher/manual/index.html](http://speedata.github.io/publisher/manual/index.html) \- Switch to the other language in the footer

</comment><comment><USER25> I would add my friend's hpy - which ket you write in Hebrew (compiles into python) [http://nirs.freeshell.org/hpy/](http://nirs.freeshell.org/hpy/)

<comment> why-el This is great. I am working on a simple Arabic (Actually Moroccan arabic) programming language to help popularize programming in some remote schools I work with. Mind helping me reach out to your friend about how this has been used and what challenges faced in general?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think that English words tend to be very short; so in English one has to type less - having concise commands is an important feature for a programming language;

I don't know if it is an urban legend: I read that in English the length of a words is shorter than in Japanese; so in WW2 the English language was better for shouting out orders - less time for communication means more time for action;

</comment><comment><USER27> So disappointed in no Varaq[1].

[1] [http://freecode.com/projects/varaq](http://freecode.com/projects/varaq)

<comment><USER28> It's on Wikipedia; you can add it yourself.

<comment><USER27> Not anymore, since they require accounts now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> With most languages you can already use localised identifiers, even nowadays with UTF-8 for languages with non latin alphabet. And for the keywords, you can most often use cpp or another preprocessor to substitute them.

But the summum is reached with perligata.

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder how programming language based on fusional natural languages with cases could work.

Some ideas (warning - long and useless read):

\- everything is an expression

\- expressions have Cases. Default case (without postfixes) is Source Case

\- cases are like roles for parts of expression in given complex expression context (allow us to change order of arguments in expressions without named parameters for example, and to overload functions/macros depending on Cases of the supplied arguments)

\- you can define pre-, -post, and -in- fixes that work like macros/functions

\- you can use pre/post fixes to tag expression with cases in the context of an expression

\- you can use 1-arg functions/macros as pre and postfixes, or as regular functions

\- you can use 2-arg functions/macros as infixes or as regular functions

\- more than 2arg functions can only be used as regular functions

\- you can overload functions/macros depending on case of args

\- you can define your own cases

Example:

        % %1 %2 etc are unamed arguments in
                macro/function definitions,
                like in lambdas in clojure

        "-" is used in pre/in/post fixed macros
            definitions to mark where the base
            identifier goes

        %-! is 1arg macro that defines variable of name %.

Example:

        a!
        foobar!

        %-a is postfix macro that tags variable %
            with Target case
        %-i tags with Helper case
        %-p tags with PositiveConditional case
        %-n tags with NegativeConditional case

        %1a=%2 is infix 2arg macro that assigns to
               variable %1 (must be in Target case)
               value %2 (in Source case).

Can be used as regular macro:

        = %1a %2

     or equivalently

        = %2 %1a

We can also overload = to be equality operator if both args are in Source case

        %1=%2

     works with regular macro too:

        = %1 %2

     or

        = %2 %1

We can overload binary operators with 3rd and 4th args in PositiveConditional and NegativeConditional cases and we don't need IFs :)

This also allows us to write if with only else clause in the form:

        > x 0 (OUTPUTa="X SMALLER THAN 0!!!")n

        %1-;-%2 is infix macro that evaluates in sequence.
                It's overloaded for all cases, especially
                for %1a-;-%2a

        # is python-style comment

     Example code to calculate real roots of quadratic equation:

       a! b! c! delta!           # definitions of variables
       = INPUT aa ba ca          # overloaded = macro with
                                 # many targets (a b c in Target case)
                                 # and one source
                                 # to easily fetch many items from input
       deltaa=((b^2)-4*a*c)      # precedence will be a problem
                                 # to define generally

        = delta 0                # overloaded = equality test with
                                 # 3rd arg being positive conditional case
                                 # and 4th being negative conditional case
          (
            = OUTPUTa "x0=" (-b/(2*a)) # overloaded = macro with one target
                                       # and many sources - will join the sources
          )p
          (> delta 0
             (
               = OUTPUTa "x0=" (-b-sqrt(delta))/(2*a);
               = OUTPUTa "x1=" (-b+sqrt(delta))/(2*a)
             )p
          )n

<comment><USER31> Love it.

I know a bit of Finnish, and I can imagine that a programming language built on the principles of Finnish grammar would be beautifully expressive as well as extremely terse.

For example, maybe '-ss' denotes 'class'. Functions and methods with '-ef' with an optional return type '-int', '-ing' (string), '-oat' (float). Start a loop iterator by adding '-oop' to an iterable? Modify conditionals change their behaviour, e.g. 'ifret' (if/return) etc

       Fooss:
         barefint:
           thingoop(i)
             ifret i == someValue

Looks strange, but I if you're used to the concept I wonder if it would be more efficient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't understand the urge to create a new language to make a statement instead of trying to improve on what already exists.

<comment><USER33> Creating a language to make a statement is probably a bad idea, but there are plenty of other valid reasons to create something new:

• You want to learn how languages work.

• You have a problem which is difficult to solve in other languages but easy in yours.

• You want to combine features that have never been combined before, to see if their interaction creates something of value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've been thinking of making a scripting language in Korean alphabet Hangul. The properties of Hangul alphabet allows you to compress multiple consanants and vowels. for example: system.out.println("Hello"); would be in Korean 시.웃.플("안녕하세요"); the Korean words themselves have no coherent meaning but this is how you could distinguish from the programming language and semantic korean language.</comment>


JQuery Mobile 1.1.0 RC1 - <AUTHOR> http://jquerymobile.com/blog/2012/02/28/announcing-jquery-mobile-1-1-0-rc1/

<comment> w-ll "Unfortunately, after a ton of work, we've determined that it's not possible to dumb down page transitions enough to get acceptable performance in Android 2.x, even on a newer device like a Nexus S running 2.3."

<comment><AUTHOR> You'll note this problem is not isolated to jQuery Mobile:

[at the bottom] <http://www.sencha.com/blog/sencha-touch-2-raising-the-bar/>

Generally Android's stock browser performs really poorly where css animations are concerned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> It's nice to see that they're putting effort into this, but the "True Fixed Toolbars" are still broken. That's been the biggest reason I've avoided the project so far. They're using css fixed positioning which is now better supported on mobile devices, but it produces an "uncanny valley" effect now. The "fixed" toolbars move up and down slightly as the page scrolls. That gives you 99% of the effect you're going for, but that 1% just makes it feel awkward and out-of-place.

The Sencha touch team had this sorted out over a year ago. There's really no excuse to not have this feature, or to have a broken implementation. Hopefully the jQuery Mobile team gets it sorted out eventually.

<comment><USER3> How does Sencha Touch compare to jQuery Mobile, in general? They are both open source, which is desirable, but I'm not sure which one will mature the most in the next year or so.

<comment><USER4> Sencha touch is way ahead in my opinion. just check out the kitchen sink demos of Sencha: <http://dev.sencha.com/deploy/touch/examples/kitchensink/> and jquery mobile: <http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.1.0-rc.1/>

<comment><USER5> sencha's kitchensink page completely fails to render in my Opera browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's incredibly frustrating to want, more than anything, to build a cross- platform mobile app that _feels_ native and still it's not a realistic expectation.

I'm still pushing my team forward on using jQuery Mobile. I was hoping, praying, that the biggest UX issues would be solved by the time we were ready to launch our app. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like that will be the case.

My biggest issue is one that seems minor on paper, but is infuriating as a user. I'm talking about the 200ms tap delay that is prevalent inside any Mobile Safari instance. I've seen dozens of "fixes" for this issue published in jQuery Mobile builds, but here we are, at March of 2012, and apps still feel incredibly sluggish due to this tap delay.

I'm going to have my devs take a hard look at the behavior to see if they can code up a bespoke solution, but golly, I was really hoping we wouldn't need to waste our time.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I've seen dozens of "fixes" for this issue published in jQuery Mobile builds

I'm not sure if that means you already know about it, but the virtual click infrastructure was built for this specific purpose.

[1/4 of the way down] <http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.0.1/docs/api/events.html>

Just make sure you don't use the virtual click events with elements that move as the browser will fire it's post-touch click on what's there when the time comes.

<comment><USER6> Yes, the .tap() stuff is a holdover from jQTouch. It doesn't work very well, with some things responding correctly (buttons) and others not (inputs/checkboxes).

<comment><AUTHOR> I was talking about the virtual mouse events. It abstracts over touch and click events so you can bind to "both" by binding to "vclick" while still getting the faster responses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Typo: our scrolling feels 100% native because is _is_.</comment>


Show HN: ZAPPER, to quickly remove annoying banners and popups - <AUTHOR> https://maxwellito.github.io/zapper/ <comment><USER2> Looks a lot like the "Nuke Anything" plugin.</comment>


Ask YC: Advantages of using an API instead of pulling RSS - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering what your thoughts are on using API's versus pulling RSS feeds. <comment><USER2> RSS usually only gives you recent items. API's let you pull the full history... or even upload stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> good point.</comment></comment>


A Distributed Version of Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets - <AUTHOR> http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2015/09/a-distributed-version-of-repugnance-as-a-constraint-on-markets.html#.VeWukdNViko

<comment><USER2> > Ripple sets the threshold high (80 percent) to provide adequate protection > from double spending. But by doing so, it gives a submajority the ability to > block transactions that they perceive to be repugnant.

So in the context of an exchange, a small minority could, say, stop short selling or halt the market in a high volatility environment. All this ads liquidity risk which in turn reduces the value of the infrastructure.

<comment><USER3> "All this ads liquidity risk which in turn reduces the value of the infrastructure."

Completely agree, and here's what's especially interesting about that comment: in the "traditional" (non-Bitcoin/ripple/etc) finance world, it takes an even SMALLER minority to block transactions.

From the perspective of "how many people do you need to piss off before you cease to have liquidity", the worst system on the planet is ye old bank.

<comment><USER4> In the traditional world, there is a _specific_ minority you can't piss off. But with Ripples, you can't piss of _any_ sufficiently large minority. This is a big difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A slight aside: in the first paragraph they mention matching problems. I wish more people in the "sharing economy" world made themselves aware of this.

Most companies in that field seem to behave as if providers are fungible, when instead, the underlying problems they're fixing are matching problems.</comment>


1% rule - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) <comment><USER3> I once ran the numbers for HN and was surprised at how closely they matched this rule. Maybe I'll do it again.

Edit: here are some estimates. We don't track enough to know about distinct users, so all we can do is guess.

The number of accounts that have posted to HN this year, divided by the number of IP addresses that have accessed HN, is 0.008. How close that is to the '1% rule' depends on which is the bigger factor: users with more than one IP or IPs with more than one user. We don't know. If the former is bigger, then 0.008 is a lower bound.

Here's another way. The number of accounts that have posted this year, divided by the number of accounts that have viewed HN while logged in, is 0.36. That doesn't tell us much, but we can estimate the ratio of logged-in users to total users this way: logged-in page views divided by total page views. That ratio is 0.23. We can multiply those two to estimate the ratio of posters to total:

       posters      logged-in
      </comment><comment>---  *  </comment><comment>---
      logged-in       total

       = 0.36 * 0.23
       = 0.0828

So the two ways of estimating produce 0.8% and 8% respectively. Both ways are bogus in that they assume things we don't know and mix units that aren't the same, but they're the two I came up with and I don't remember how I did it before. It's interesting that they're almost exactly an order of magnitude apart. That makes it tempting to say the number is probably in between, but that's another cognitive bias talking.

<comment><USER4> I used to submit more years ago, but it got ridiculous to get votes. I suspect there must be a LOT of brigading to get posts out of the /newest cesspool.

<comment><USER5> The internet feels very hostile nowadays - it seems like there's no end of people ready to take any comment out of context, and misconstrue to start an argument.

<comment><USER3> HN's guidelines are designed to dampen that. Example: " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to criticize. Assume good faith._"

Of course the existence of guidelines does not imply the existence of guideline-following.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hope many of us internalized this early. It's not very accurate, but I try to think of this as meaning that on average, everything I post online is being read by a minimum of 99 people, multiplied by either the upvote count on the thread (for HN) or the number of active followers I have (for Twitter). It has helped me to always think this to myself before posting something.

I probably am biased from the culture on these sites but it still seems all to easy for people to still get dragged into fruitless discussions, overly emotional flamewars and trollbait that they will regret later.

<comment><USER7> That's why I left Quora. I'm a really gullible person, and I was going to respond to somebody who posted something inflammatory, then I realized I had the option to just walk away. So I did.

I remember something similar about companies too. When you have product market fit, customers will sear you when your product doesn't work. If you don't, you'll never hear from them again.

<comment><USER8> Good guide to avoiding trolls. Golden rule: "A conversation is not a contest"

[https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...](https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Trolls.md)

<comment><USER9> Some very insightful thoughts in that link. I especially liked these two:

"People who provide challenging opinions are not trolling so long as they are not deviating from the conversation at hand. There are some people whose only goal is to attain emotional harmony. When a challenging opinion is encountered it is easy for some people to view this disruption to the social norm as trolling, when it likely isn't."

"Some people are easily offended. When a person engages in a conversation directly without distraction they aren't trolling simply because you became emotional."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The 1% rule is often misunderstood to apply to the Internet in general, but > it applies more specifically to any given Internet community. ... only 23% > of the population (rather than 90 percent) could properly be classified as > lurkers, while 17% of the population could be classified as intense > contributors of content.

This is something important to take into account. I can be a lurker in Hacker News but a top contributor in my towns gardeners forum.

Any given person has a maximum time that can dedicate to lurk or contribute. But, one hour of lurking has way more coverage than one hour of contributing. e.g. I can read Reddit, Hacker News, and Wikipedia and still have time left to eat breakfast. But, I want to contribute a new Wikipedia article, probably I will need that complete hour or even more. So, I just contribute to 1 community while lurking in the rest.

<comment><USER11> Really good points.

Anecdotally; this also seems to correlate roughly to my personal lurk : contribute ratio. I consume far more than I put out.

<comment> blaser-waffle Unless you're a paid online marketer / shillbot, or maybe some sort of journalist / blogger, I suspect this is true for everyone on the intrawebs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> On top of that, some percentage of users who _do_ contribute content are just recycling/reiterating content they've seen have success in that community before. Reposts, memes, predictable opinions, etc. The number of people who actively create the culture of an online community (and, I suspect, offline communities) is pretty small.

<comment><USER13> Where does the novelty element start, though? Someone could come and argue that your comment is also predictable, as is my reply below it.

<comment><USER14> Thats what is most interesting about human innovation and creativity in general. There are very very very few original ideas out there. Almost any idea anyone has had, a large number of people have had it. And most innovation is just tiny tweaks to existing formulas, over time. In fact, if you understand the backstory behind most innovations, you realize it really wasn't all that impressive. There were many proposed models for flight before the wright brothers. They stumbled upon the right mixture. Modern day car fuel engines have essentially evolved over centuries of perfecting "torches" (fire and gas to create heat) The people who make history are simply the first ones to act upon these thoughts. So, you become a content creator/culture setter, by simply being the first one to vocalize your thoughts.

<comment><USER15> That is essentially the point in Gladwell's famous article "In the Air | Who says big ideas are rare?"

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/in-the- air](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/in-the-air)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Long time lurker here.I often feel I have nothing useful to contribute.So I don't. You're welcome.

<comment><USER17> What I discovered, decades ago, was that posting questions, or even better, answers, _even wrong ones_ (unintentionally) is a phenomenal way to learn things.

That still holds true. Though it helps profoundly to not insist on being wrong.

Which I try to do. Not always successfully.

<comment><USER18> I once posted a honest question and I have to say I felt chilled by the downvotes. I'd have expected votes to reflect a more constructive attitude.

<comment><USER17> I consider myself something of an HN contrarian.

There are some downvotes, though on balance I've been better received than I'd expected.

Sometimes researching on your own to indicate you've attempted clarification, helps. "Did you mean / are you referring to X? ..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> We're all in our little alcoves of the human experience, trying the best we can to make the most of the situation we find ourselves in. For most of us, no matter how good we are at something, there are probably 100-million other people just as good as you.

The 1% rule reflects this reality: every snowflake is unique, but individual snowflakes are not special.

The 1% of people who contribute to an online community are either people who've gotten to the point that they think they have something to contribute, or they're crapflooders with nothing better to do.

Sometimes a few people (say, 1-in-10-million) rise above the ruckus and do something exceptional, or lay the groundwork for a future generation to build upon. In the last two centuries we've had a series of developments by people who laid the foundation for our species to achieve liftoff: James Clerk Maxwell, Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Nikola Tesla, Hewlett & Packard, Grace Hopper, William Shockley, and a hundred thousand remarkable/mildly-remarkable others.

Hopefully in the next few decades our species can capitalize on the foundations provided by our predecessors, and we can make it into orbit.

But most people are "average" or below average. My pseudonym started as my reports of an unremarkable person trying to make observations of average people's struggles. I grew up in a top 10% income household (parents took my sibling and myself on vacations), had a reasonable college fund (which was not well-spent), and didn't appreciate how the other 90% lived until I started driving around in my taxi.

Our present engineered shutdown of the economy for a significant percentage of the 90% of people who are no longer needed as farmers should be used as an opportunity to reconsider how things are done for the 99% of people who are just trying their best to get by.

</comment><comment><USER20> Same goes for bugs. 90 pct of your users doesn't even report downtime. A report on something non major is rare. I learned to listen to reported problems carefully, however weird.

<comment><USER21> Depends on the user. Some report every blip in their wifi.

<comment><USER20> Funny you say that. We had someone in a remote office complaining of neverending WIFI problems, but never reproducable. None of the coworkers mentioned any problems. All network statistics said everything fine. One day I happen to be in the neighbourhood so let's take a look.

Turns out the line was upgraded by the phone company, but the old modem never removed. So there was a new phone line connected to a new modem connected to nothing. Next to it a literally crumbling phone line, an old modem thrown on the ground and buried under a mess of boxes and overheating, connected to their core router. Monitoring was a mess of statistics from the old and new system thrown together, so nobody noticed for over 2 years.

Why she was the only complainer at that office, I will never understand. But she stopped complaining that very day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been doing a Twitch development stream (a couple hours a day working on a dwarf fortress game in Rust). In the stream, I'll have about 90% lurkers, 10% people who engage in chat and about 1% that have sent me actual PRs for the code :-) It's very interesting. (BTW, I should be streaming now... Bad Mike...)

</comment><comment><USER23> 1% sounds bad, but compared to pre-internet days it's pretty good. Consider a large city newspaper: probably hundreds of journalists and letter writers, but millions of readers, so much less than 1%.

<comment><USER24> Also speaks to the nature of influence and power throughout history. Usually it's only around 1% of the human population that can reach and impact the lives of more than a few hundred others (roughly the size of a small village where you can get to know everyone) and expand their influence over countries and empires of millions. Likewise, history only records the details of the lives of far less than 1% of all people that have ever lived. If you were one of the peasant masses, your entire life is summarized by whatever tidbits of trivia historians can glean from the artifacts from the grave of the one lucky person that they happened to find. Same idea, 1% of all the graves that ever existed serve to illustrate the lives of the rest of humanity to future historians.

Really gives you a perspective on where an individual's life fits into the grand scheme of things. If you don't make it into the history books, in a 100 years once everyone who ever knew you as a person has passed it'll be as if you never existed at all.

<comment> swagasaurus-rex Even those people in the history books, it's hard to care about them really beyond caricatured silhouettes of who history portrayed them to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think this is a key to understanding online discourse. A lot of the stuff you see is generated by a very small percentage of the users (probably much less than 1% if you look at the numbers[1]), and this small percentage likely consists of the more problematic users. Consider that:

\- The amount of output someone can put out is inversely proportional to the time and effort someone spends on it. If it takes about 30 seconds to throw out a low quality post full of misinformation and 30 minutes to make an accurate and well thought out post, than the former is going to far outnumber the latter.

\- The amount of effort someone puts out is inversely proportional to the amount of time someone spends offline. Someone who is addicted to social media and lives online is going to be producing much more content than someone with a healthier balance that includes lots of offline time.

Almost all online spaces are set up in a way in which this small number of (often problematic) users dominate the output and overwhelm most other users. The voting system used on sites like Reddit further exacerbate the problem. It shouldn't be surprising then that online spaces are the way they are. We should recognize that it's the result of how they're set up, and not a reflection of human behavior as a whole.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/)

<comment><USER26> This was a really interesting comment to read that I feel accurately summarizes most of the points being made here. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Commenting just to mess with the ratios on this rule.

<comment><USER28> count me in too !

<comment><USER29> Hardly making a dent here !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Related discussion: "Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People (2019)"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827)

</comment><comment><USER17> For Google+, by one measure (all registered profiles), the "1%" were actually the 0.16%

When considered against all profiles _which had posted at least once_ , which gets around the forced-account dynamic, the comparison of 0.16% vs. 5.09%, is ... approximately π%: 3.1434185% Much closer to the 1% rule, and probably more accurately reflecting actual lurkers, which should bring it even closer in line.

[https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for- the...](https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the-activity- on-google-plus/)

NB: The research above was based on methods I'd developed, and reached results quite similar to my own, though it was done independently and I had no idea it was performed until Eric Enge published it.

Communicating just how thin active G+ usership was, to many of those active I=users, proved surprisingly hard. People have little innate grasp of statistics or very large numbers -- 2.2 billion+ profiles at the time.

Also, MAU (monthly active users) is a far better measure than regisration counts.

Especially for mandatory accounts.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is extended in the post/article "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People" [0].

> The 1% rule is of course just another way of saying that the distribution of > contributions follows a Power Law Distribution, which means that the level > of inequality gets more drastic as you look at smaller subsets of users.

> Wikipedia's most active 1,000 people — 0.003% of its users — contribute > about two-thirds of the site's edits. Wikipedia is thus even more skewed > than blogs, with a 99.8–0.2–0.003 rule.

> 167,113 of Amazon's book reviews were contributed by just a few "top-100" > reviewers; the most prolific reviewer had written 12,423 reviews. How > anybody can write that many reviews — let alone read that many books — is > beyond me.

> YouTube power-user Justin Y. had a top comment on pretty much every video > you clicked on for like a year. He says he spends 1-3 hours per day > commenting on YouTube, finds videos by looking at the statistics section of > the site to see which are spiking in popularity, and comments on a lot of > videos without watching them.

> If you consume _any_ content on the Internet, you're mostly consuming > content created by people who for some reason spend most of their time and > energy creating content on the Internet. And those people clearly differ > from the general population in important ways. I don't really know what to > do with this observation except to note that it seems like it's worth > keeping in mind when using the Internet.

Of course, that post's author is clearly insane. With 72k reputation and 1000 posts on Stack Exchange, I'm proudly insane. And if you're about to reply with a witty comment, you might just be insane, too. ;)

0: [https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/)

</comment><comment><USER32> A Redditor did an analysis of Reddit's ratio and it's more like 98-x-y (x and y were not broken out): [https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/b5f9wi/let...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/b5f9wi/lets_hear_it_for_the_lurkers_the_vast_majority_of/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Hello, hundred people that'll read this comment! I can't hear what you have to say, but hopefully it's not _too_ scathing.

</comment><comment><USER34> > A 2005 study of radical Jihadist forums found 87% of users had never posted > on the forums, 13% had posted at least once, 5% had posted 50 or more times, > and only 1% had posted 500 or more times.[5]

This struck me as a bit funny. I can imagine the 87% being the NSA, BND and other law enforcement watching the activity on the forum.

</comment><comment><USER35> I remember the days of early social networking: I.e. pre-mass networking like we have now with FB, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, etc.

It seemed then that more individuals participated then, than do today (literally, those Sam individuals have fallen off).

Anyway, I wonder at what size of "community" this principle takes hold. Certainly, some form of it is true at the scale of modern social media as mentioned above, and it seems the same for the quarterly class updates that come from my college. But at 20 people we seem to have a sort of "small group dynamics" principle take over.

And maybe, then the right way to think about this is that as the groups size approaches one, I should be applying this model to groups as a whole ("in a collection of small groups, only 1% flourish, 9% stay stagnant, and 90% are silent").

</comment><comment><USER36> I feel like this should take spam and bots into account. I run a wiki and most edits are by bots that I rollback. I don't add captcha to not further dissuade people from contributing.

<comment><USER37> Add a hidden checkbox. If checked, it's definitely a bot. You get rid of more than 99.99% of bots, from my experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I had the feeling that there are more creators lately, but since Smartphones and mobile internet got big, there are also magnitudes more lurkers online, so it's probably still right

</comment><comment><USER39> There is also the concept of partial consumption. Often you might click on something you think might be interesting, peruse or preview it, then decide it wasn't as interesting as you thought and move on. Did you actually consume that content or did you preview it? There is no way to know if someone is lurking, actually fully consuming the content or simply previewing it. There is probably no way to prove this but my guess is that 90% of the consumers are actually previewers.

</comment><comment><USER40> This applies to real life as well. I'd replace "lurker" with passive, "contributor" with active, and "creator" with changer.

</comment><comment><USER41> I blab online quite a bit (in comments only, no blog or anything), but I rarely vote/like/etc. Does that make me more or less of a narcissist?

<comment><USER42> blowhards ⊂ narcissists

( I'm not calling you anything; I don't know you. Just making an observation :-) )

<comment><USER41> An astute one at that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > The 1% rule is often misunderstood to apply to the Internet in general, but > it applies more specifically to any given Internet community.

What a broad statement

</comment><comment><USER44> Well, this kind of disproportion would only be worse in traditional media: dozens of writers serving millions of newspaper/magazine readers.

<comment><USER45> Even worse, each article has only 1 writer for all readers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I really like this reddit post about this topic: Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People [https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/)

<comment><USER47> I wish there was a similar analysis for comments left on boards like this one and reddit (which I left earlier this year because the website just isn't what it used to be).

Although, I would say it's an interesting take on Amazon reviews. A place not many people believe could be as popping as it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> How should we take it if we have 60%+ of users creating content, and very few lurkers? Is that a good thing? Or under-optimized?

</comment><comment><USER49> Wikipedia is confusing. Which is it?

> The 1% rule states that the number of people who create content on the > Internet represents approximately 99% of the people who view that content.

or

> 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet > community , stating that only 1% of the users of a website add content, > while the other 99% of the participants only lurk .

</comment><comment><USER50> I find that if I am excited about a subject, I tend to participate a lot more (create/edit) than if I am simply consuming. I think there is a 1% rule for /topics/ as well, i.e. I as a user am interested in actively creating/contributing to 1% of all topics I see...

</comment><comment><USER51> Things "even out" here, its been like that for years. The top comments are usually smart with added inflammatory BS that only top comments possess. You can actually find really good advice, about many subjects, right after that first block of unstoppable up-votes.

</comment><comment><USER52> I wonder how having the amount of posts you made (like forums do) influences this number. And subsequently how others on the platform respond (since it's in their best interest to be as kind as possible to new posters to make the community grow?)

</comment><comment><USER53> I wonder how social distancing is effecting online posting numbers right about now?

</comment><comment><USER54> My prediction: this will be the one post where the 1% rule doesn't apply, as a much larger number will be spurred into action by the topic in question - <USER2> end up actually saying something.

<comment><USER55> It's funny, because in the list of comments, the comment above yours says he's doing exactly that :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I would be very interested in understanding the psychology of the 1%. I would bet they (we? I mostly lurk, but am still probably at least in the top 10%) are a very weird bunch.

<comment><USER57> I have worked closely with some phenomenal 1%-ers. :-) They are really efficient at processing broad information in what you could call a shallow manner. They also don't feel the depth-of-comprehension pressure that some of us 99%-ers feel.

To them it's just interesting, interesting, ah wow, next thing, ok cool...that sort of thing. It's like rolling down the windows in your car, letting in some outside air. Sharing is fun, in part because the personally-felt pressure to _do_ in response (learn about it, make something of it) is low, in their experience.

The 99% audience is comprised of a lot of people who are a FOMO audience, and this flow can create serious stress for the portion of those people who read about a new idea and they feel the need to _do_ something about it. Meanwhile the 1% crew are often sharing third-party info briefly and broadly, with brief commentary, but no real interest or pressure to seriously do something or make something.

IMO each group can be said to carry really impressive gifts/benefits. And encouraging lurkers to post is always nice, but many of them also secretly wish for a more inviting / less critical community. HN has a _lot_ of commenters ready to smash the next idea into bits by intuiting its flaws, and some will naturally take that as a sign of a toxic community, or at least one that isn't as welcoming in their view. It's tough to work on this issue because it can radically affect the balance of the community psychology and upset larger groups of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> This is not a scientific measurement. "1%" is an idiom for "very few". "9%" is a mismathematization of "10%" meaning "few".

</comment><comment><USER58> I thought it was the basis of consulting companies as was told to me by an old boss: "if you know 1% more than the other guy you are the expert!"

</comment><comment><USER59> I estimated that about 1 out of 100 would review and or rate my apps. Except for paid then it was more like 1 out of 25 but that might be an exception.

</comment><comment><USER60> What percent get banned? There are plenty of percents who would happily edit pages on wikipedia about politics, but those pages tend to be locked.

<comment><USER17> From G+, in the final months of the service, daily creation _and deletion_ of Communities (not Profiles, though a related proxy measure) was in the 1,000s per day.

For Profiles, odds of being deleted (usually a banning consequence AFAICT) was far higher for those which had posted than those which hadn't.

Given churn in troll and spam accounts, percentages can be quite high, even multiples of legitimate accounts.

Both observations based on outside measurements -- I am not and have never been a Google employee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> [https://youtu.be/Gs069dndIYk](https://youtu.be/Gs069dndIYk)

</comment><comment><USER62> Applies well to political involvement of any kind. Or just any social organization supporting a cause

</comment><comment><USER63> That 1% really flatters themselves if they think of themselves as "creators".

<comment><USER64> Oscar Wilde's got you covered.

[https://www.wilde-online.info/the-critic-as-artist.html](https://www.wilde- online.info/the-critic-as-artist.html)

> THE CRITIC AS ARTIST: WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING

Reflecting on my internet posting history, sometimes it does seem like a whole lot of nothing. But I still like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> You're 1 in 100, poster.

</comment><comment><USER66> <h1>NICE!</h1></comment>


Ask HN: Do you know a good resource for large data scraping job? - <AUTHOR>

My company, Easy Vino (easyvino.com), is gearing up for beta release and we need to populate our database with wine lists. The job consists of extracting information from wine lists (which we have and are usually PDF, HTML or Pictures) to put it into our database.
We have a simple back office that connects to a wine API to search for wine info and we need help inputing the data. I'd rather have the same person (or team) doing this as the learning curve is significant.
Does anyone know a cheap resource for this type of task? Any help or reference is appreciated.
Thanks a lot! <comment><USER2> I'm not sure exactly what sort of answer you are expecting. Unless the data you want is in a standardized format (such as a standardized XML schema), any effort to extract data would require writing custom parsers for each set of data that has a different structure. I'm not sure if you are asking for advice on which technology stack to use for writing this or are looking for a pre- made tool that can extract this for you? There may be some tools that can "attempt" to do this without requiring you to write custom code but I am not sure how effective they would be.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe it has to be a person. I've used Mechanical Turk in the past and it's great for easy, simple tasks. This one requires a little learning, which means sticking to one person/team would be best because they can quickly get faster and more efficient.

I'm looking for advice on companies or people you've used in the past that you liked. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The typical way of doing this is to use mechanical turk, there are some third party services (their name escapes me) which are built on top of mturk to provide reliability.

The typical way they do this is to have two different people enter the data and when there's a mismatch have a supervisor decide which is right.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've used mechanical turk in the past for easy tasks. This one requires a little learning and I feel people get a lot faster even after 1 day. My concern with Mturk is having different people all the time, which is a lot less efficient. To give you a number, right now it takes me 1-2 minutes to add a line, whereas for someone new it takes him 5-8 minutes. That's the kind of learning curve I'm hoping for if I hire the same person to do this for 2-3 weeks.

Do you know if Mturk can offer this? Thanks a lot!

<comment><USER3> I believe you can create a custom group of qualified workers on mturk

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You might have good luck just hiring some cheap Virtual Assistants to do this work for you. oDesk or elance are pretty good for these types of administrative tasks

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Do you know anyone in particular?

<comment><USER4> Alas, I don't have any personal experience with hiring a VA - I've just listened to Rob Walling talk about them a lot.

I've used oDesk several times though for other things and it works fairly well. My suggestion is to write up a short "test" project and hire out five or six competent looking VAs. Give them a hard deadline (two hours tops, etc) and see who completes the job in a satisfactory manner.

Some will totally suck, some will never get back to you, and a few will be awesome. If your entire group sucks, ditch them and move on to a new group of candidates.

Once you find someone that is good and in your price range, give them a larger task and see how it goes.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! I'll try that</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Quay - Super simple keyboard shortcuts in JS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/andyhmltn/quay

<comment><USER2> What is the license? I don't see any sort of license specified either in the code or the readme, which means it's explicitly copyrighted by you. I'd love to use this at my job, but I can't if you own it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Woops, that's a fault on my part. I'll add a license now. It's under MIT :-)

<comment><USER2> KickASS! We're educational, so that works perfectly for us. Thanks a ton!

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, glad I could help :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Memcached 1.4.10 is live - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/memcached/wiki/ReleaseNotes1410

<comment><USER2> Cool to see memcached evolving, a few days ago I had a problem in Redis that was reported to be slow with setting big values in the order of 1 MB, what I did was to profile both memcached (that performed well with the 1 MB payload) and Redis with the same work load, checking with osx Instruments what was the difference in the trace, and this allowed me to easily fix a few problems in Redis (now merged into unstable).

I'll surely check the changes in 1.4.10 as well to see if there is some good idea I can reuse for Redis. The memcached code base is very nice to read.

<comment><USER3> As entry size grows different parts of the engine are under pressure, allocation-wise and i/o-wise.

AFAIK memcached isn't advised entries above 1 MiB.

We can maintain performance for entries as large as 200 MiB (provided that you have enough memory) but it cost us a lot of sweat!

We haven't benchmarked for larger entries as we weren't sure it would make much sense.

<comment><USER3> The performances I'm talking for large entries are for our engine "wrpme", not for memcached, I realize it wasn't clear in my post and I can't edit it anymore, sorry about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have read a bit about memcached in the past. I have a lot of video on my site. Would memcached be able to have me specify the most popular videos and cache them so users dont always have to load it? Or is that Varnish?

So many products that seem very similar...

<comment><USER5> For site videos, if your users are loading them a lot I'd recommend setting far-future expires headers.

But what you probably want in this case is a CDN. Amazon's Cloudfront is easy to set up, but there are many to choose from and they each have their own advantages.</comment></comment>


Dropbox CTO Resigns - <AUTHOR> https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1467623/000146762319000021/a10219form8-k.htm <comment><USER3> Dropbox has slowly but surely gone from a product I enjoyed and recommended to one that I actively dislike using. I find it pretty astonishing that such a mature product:

\- Is slow

\- Demolishes my MBP's battery

\- Has not gotten simpler to use

And worst of all, it is completely out of line with what their competition are charging. They want $12.50-15/mo for their most basic plan when their competition is charging $0-10 for their core feature set.

I wish them well, but once iCloud launches file sharing I'm 100% done with them.

<comment><USER4> _For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software_

In all seriousness, have you looked at OneDrive + Office365?

For $70/year you get 1 TB of storage, a client that works on all platforms, plus Microsoft Office 365 (online) and two licences for the desktop install of Microsoft Office plus the Office apps for iOS/Android. It's a great deal and works well.

<comment><USER5> What if you want more than 1 TB?

I've not found any option to purchase more storage for a non-business Office365 account.

<comment><USER6> Office 365 is $99 a year for 6 users each with 1TB. You can create another user and share their 1TB with your primary account.

It doesn't work like DropBox, the shared space is added to yours. With Dropbox, any shared folders are subtracted from your allocated space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reminder that DropBox now uses a background web server instead of a native interface for their bare minimum client.

</comment><comment><USER8> Famously, Steve Jobs once called Dropbox "a feature, not a product."

<comment><USER9> Maybe "products" are actually bad when they lock you into an ecosystem like the company Steve Jobs headed does.

<comment><USER10> I typically hear the categories as feature, product, platform (aka ecosystem). Apple is a platform/ecosystem. Dropbox is a feature/product, but definitely not a platform.

In SV, "just a feature" has a derogatory connotation, sort of like "lifestyle business". It causes people who run feature companies to try to get away from this characterization – even if it means stretching their business into something that it cannot easily become. This is especially true for features that have no moat, and which would therefore be Sherlocked [1] by companies like Apple.

1: [https://www.howtogeek.com/297651/what-does-it-mean-when-a- co...](https://www.howtogeek.com/297651/what-does-it-mean-when-a-company- sherlocks-an-app/)

<comment><USER9> Yeah, you've accurately explained how Silicon Valley culture can ruin companies that would be completely sustainable otherwise. Thanks!

<comment><USER10> For the record, I think both of these derogatory connotations are crap, and I run a "feature" startup myself. Fortunately, we don't need venture investment since we're running breakeven. Even with issued patents and paid licensees, it's nigh impossible to find VCs interested in a feature company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Dropbox is still an insanely awesome product, and one of the few that I actually pay for and use on a daily basis -- it is a lifeline for my business!

<comment><USER12> I would have said the same thing in 2010 when I first started my business and needed file sharing/syncing in a small team. Everything just worked on Linux & Windows. Then they started tweaking everything, adding useless features, and it seems to be more of a hassle every year. But I'm still using it but if a cheaper, more lightweight service was offered, I'd probably switch.

<comment><USER13> Nextcloud? A NAS device? Google Drive? Practically all of these are cheaper and have the same or better usefulness. There's actually a ton of storage options out there.

<comment><USER14> Nextcloud and a NAS would both qualify as a hassle, I think. They have to be admin'd. After all NAS and FTP already existed when Dropbox launched.

Google drive is similar to Dropbox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Although I'm going off Dropbox because of their attempts to become a "platform" I think people are forgetting a bit of what file syncing was like before Dropbox and how far behind the competition still are (at least in my view). Block-level syncing (so entire files aren't transferred with each small change) and rock-solid reliability is a pretty compelling combination for me. This is particularly so given that their prices are a drop in the ocean as a percentage of total expenses.

I keep trying other services (they'd need to be hosted by someone else - <USER2> don't want the added headaches of managing my own setup), but none have come close yet.

</comment><comment><USER16> Dropbox has a tough road ahead. With Google Drive, Microsoft Word cloud suite and Box, its definitely getting tough to survive by just doing B2C. With their recent acquisitions they'll probably pivot to DocuSign like model. But they are definitely losing their niche.

<comment><USER17> B2C is the place to be - it is a niche where an excellent product is going to continue to earn excellent money. Continue to reiterate and continue to improve the product, dont overspend on infrastructure and dont rent super expensive office space in the most expensive cities in the world.

Enterprise is where SaaS companies go to die because they think that Microsofts of the world are just going to let them have the multi million dollar deals. That's a delusion.

<comment><USER18> I struggle to connect this to market facts. What big consumer SaaS tools exist? You could argue that Spotify and Netflix count. I disagree, but fine. You have networks like Tinder. You have a few tools companies like Carbonite, Dropbox, 1Password. These are niche.

In the enterprise... Slack, Twilio, Stripe, Okta, Qualtrics, Datadog, Zoom, I feel like I could name 10 more easily.

Enterprise is where SaaS companies get paid. Slack makes like half their revenue from 500 companies.

<comment><USER17> > You have a few tools companies like Carbonite, Dropbox, 1Password. These are > niche.

SmugMug. Carbonite. Mailchimp. Backblaze. It is quite literally, pick a niche and there's a company making money servicing that niche. Is it a billion dollar company? Nope. Will it ever be if it sticks to doing whatever the product that it had? Who knows. But are they going to lose money on "enterprise" while cannibalizing its B2C business? Pretty much guaranteed.

Remember Borland? The one that created a market for $100 compilers it sold millions copies? It decided to replace those millions of customers paying $100 with a hundred customers paying a million? That was a total reversal of fortunes.

> Enterprise is where SaaS companies get paid. Slack makes like half their > revenue from 500 companies.

And it still cannot make money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/dropbox-cto-departs-as- sha...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/dropbox-cto-departs-as-shares- drop-2019-10-02)

</comment><comment><USER20> It means those guys weren't innovative enough to keep making them money in some way that they wished they would.

</comment><comment><USER21> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21141513](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21141513) links to the Dropbox Blog post ([https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/thank-you-quentin-- a...](https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/thank-you-quentin--and-welcome- tim-and-bharat))

</comment><comment><USER22> Hmm. What's interesting about it?

<comment><USER23> Dropbox recently had some backlash, mostly due to them updating their OSX software that installed a new file manager without the user's explicit permission.

Not sure if it's related, but they've had some issues with their tech stack lately

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20477958](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20477958)

<comment><USER24> Do you genuinely think the Dropbox CTO resigned because of some complaints about an app dialog.

<comment><USER25> Not the OP, but 'app dialogs' and their utility/uselessness are symptomatic of the underlying philosophy and business culture which made them a 'requirement' \- so if the app dialog is undesirable, it carries implications about the internal environment in which it was developed, which may prompt someone to leave.

alternately: this was the person pushing the undesirable things, and other people pushed that person out as 'bad news', or, this person couldn't push more 'bad things' through effectively enough to his own liking and so left.

<comment><USER26> alternately: no relationship at all and this whole thread is just people dishing on their pet-peeves with the product.

<comment><USER27> Where there's smoke, there's fire

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What happened?

<comment><USER29> They screwed up a perfect piece of software.

<comment><USER30> More like competition, including open source solutions, has reached a point where Dropbox is becoming obsolete.

<comment><USER31> I don't understand why one would expect to be able to compete with iCloud, google drive, one drive. They have so much cash to burn.

<comment><USER6> Have you ever known Apple to "burn cash"? They have this crazy idea that products should be sold at a profit.

<comment><USER31> As in, whatever you can do, they can do better, since they are able to spend so much more.

<comment><USER6> It's not they can do it "better". They can do it "good enough" so that most people aren't willing to use a smaller vendor and where the value add is not enough to have a sustainable business - see Dropbox, Spotify, Etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The most interesting use case for Dropbox is enabling cross-app workflows on iPad. Most apps support the Dropbox APIs now. Apple needs to get its shit together and make iCloud the back end. They can mandate that apps support their APIs, and then iCloud gets more revenue.

<comment><USER33> Smart idea considering they did the same with "Login with Apple ID".

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> discovering how Dropbox hacks your mac

[https://applehelpwriter.com/2016/08/29/discovering-how- dropb...](https://applehelpwriter.com/2016/08/29/discovering-how-dropbox- hacks-your-mac/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338)</comment>


Boiling Poison Dice Set - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/625856064/boiling-poison-dice-set?ref=y10dy3 <comment><USER2> They try to make the dice balanced, but they don't promise they are balanced. It would be nice to see some test of how (un)balanced they are.</comment>


6 Tips for a Smooth Hand-off from Designer to Developer - <AUTHOR> http://uxmovement.com/resources/6-tips-for-a-smooth-hand-off-from-designer-to-developer/

<comment><USER2> This is great.</comment>


Electric Cars You Can Buy Right Now - <AUTHOR> http://earth2tech.com/2008/05/15/6-electric-cars-you-can-buy-right-now/

<comment><USER2> lovely.

eSafe says: _The URL[http://earth2tech.com/2008/05/15/6-electric-cars-you-can- buy...](http://earth2tech.com/2008/05/15/6-electric-cars-you-can-buy-right- now/) was blocked, it is in the Restricted Illegal Drugs category._

Is this content available elsewhere?</comment>


Reflectly app, from React Native to Flutter - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/reflectly-engineering/reflectly-from-react-native-to-flutter-2e3dffced2ea <comment><USER2> > For the following 6 months, we were caught in an awful development cycle of > building for iOS first and fixing for Android second.

How does this happen? They developed for iOS first.

It's not enough to just choose a technology that enables targeting multiple platforms. You have to iteratively deploy to them. What you can do is develop a feature on just one of the platforms and as soon as its design reaches some level of stability port it to the other. But this process should be continuous with at least an MVP +some features on each target platform.</comment>


The iPhone Is 10 Years Old. Here's the Story of Its Birth - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/books/review/one-device-secret-history-iphone-brian-merchant.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> Redirected to a pay wall. They want $8.</comment>


Why You Should Never Use a Supply and Demand Diagram for Labor Markets - <AUTHOR> http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/07/never-use-supply-demand-diagram-labor-markets.html <comment><USER2> Economist here. I concur. Much woe is caused by applying supply and demand reasoning to situations where other constraints are prevalent.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's always trotted out in threads involving "why CxOs are paid so much" -slash- golden parachutes. I'd love to see something like this connected to a specific issue like that.

IANAE, natch.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I intern abroad or in my country? - <AUTHOR>

So I'm 22, I'm in the last year of my master's degree and I need to find a 6-month internship from March to April. We are encouraged to start seeking for offers in October or November, so it's really early.
I really wanted to intern abroad for the usual reasons (nice experience, want to travel, etc.) but I already received a really interesting internship offer in my country and it's really tempting (it's in my city, it's a big company, it's paid...).
So now I'm confused: I don't know if I should accept the offer in my country or wait a few months and start seeking abroad. The thing is if I accept now, I won't have to deal with it during the year (less stress). But if I accept, I'm afraid I won't have other occasions to work in another country later (because internships in my country generally end with a permanent contract).
Do you have related experiences (working abroad during or after scholarship, is it useful, etc.)? Advices? <comment><USER2> Depends a bit on where the foreign internship is.

You have to weigh it out. Is this experience and the nice addition to your CV worth it? Is the internship abroad good enough to learn something from?

</comment><comment><USER3> where you come from? I guess you are come from China.</comment>


Russia's Intelligence Agency Hacked - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/07/20/russian-intelligence-has-been-hacked-with-social-media-and-tor-projects-exposed/#60f60cce6b11 <comment><USER2> The headline glosses over the fact that Russia has at least 3 main intelligence agencies ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_agencies_of_Russi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_agencies_of_Russia)), although the article doesn't. Score one for dopey headline writers.

This mistake lets us take note that virtually all major countries have extremely messing "intelligence communities". It's not the only irrational British thing (check out their system for rating rock climbs, for example) but the MI5/MI6/GCHQ distinction makes no sense at all, except if you want turf battles between noblemen. The US is worse, because it doesn't have an aristocracy, yet its intelligence community is organized in an even more irrational fashion.</comment>