Dunning-Kruger and other memes (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/ <comment><USER2> "The less someone knows about a subject, the more they think they know." I think that's an exaggeration and understood by most people to be one.

What _is_ , however, absolutely clear from the original study is that incompetent people have a highly inflated assessment on their own abilities: in all four experiments (!), the people with actual 10% abilities rated themselves at 50-70%. This is perfectly in line with eg. Urban Dictionary's definition[1]:

"A phenomenon where people with little knowledge or skill think they know more or have more skill than they do."

[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Dunning- Kruge...](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Dunning- Kruger%20effect)

[1] Chosen intentionally because this is a "popular" source, not an academic one.

<comment><USER3> One thing about Dunning-Kruger that I've never heard mentioned is self-esteem affecting one's answer. As in, if you explicitly mark a low score for yourself you're both divulging to others _and admitting to yourself_ that you think you're a failure in that category. So imagine you're presented with one of these forms... what incentive/preventative is given to not let your ego's self-preservation instincts kick in and put you down as "average" (50%+) for anything and everything?

Basically, I can't imagine how you'd account for the societal matter of bravado and I posit that it has an influence on the outcome of DK experiments. e.g. if you tried to account subvert bravado and had some kind of reward at the end to say "Hey, if you successfully guess your percentile for a given skill we'll give you a cookie." (which of course would incentivize you to put "0%" and intentionally bomb the test.)

<comment><USER4> Do not forget that this very "self esteem" thingy is almost exclusively American. The other nations do not even think in such terms.

<comment><USER3> I can't even process what you're saying. What culture doesn't acknowledge self respect, and one's place in society relative to others?

Certainly there are small communities _everywhere_ (even in America -- after all, they were prolific in America's infancy) that sought the creation of a hyper-communal and idyllic towns... but... those never scale because, well, people are selfish. But still. I just can't process what you're saying. Maybe I'm blinded by offense.

<comment><USER4> > What culture doesn't acknowledge self respect, and one's place in society > relative to others?

What culture (besides the Northern Americans) would so blindly equate self respect to self esteem? The others understand better that you can respect yourself even without the overblown, unrealistic views on your own abilities and virtues.

<comment> squeaky-clean > The others understand better that you can respect yourself even without the > overblown, unrealistic views on your own abilities and virtues

I don't think self esteem means what you think it means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The pop-sci version of Dunning-Kruger is that, the less someone knows about > a subject, the more they think they know.

Author's take on Dunning-Kruger is a strawman. I haven't seen that version be a "meme". I also dislike this single word rejection, the calling it a "meme", of how people talk about DK, it's like name calling or something. Unwarranted and arrogant dismissal. It's one thing to be wrong, it's another to be wrong and then also haughty about it. I feel like most people that I've seen bring DK up understand what the implications of it are. My favorite thing I've read about it is that the less you are competent in something the less you are able to gauge competence in that something.

> In two of the four cases, there's an obvious positive correlation between > perceived skill and actual skill, which is the opposite of the pop-sci > conception of Dunning-Kruger. A plausible explanation of why perceived skill > is compressed, especially at the low end, is that few people want to rate > themselves as below average or as the absolute best.

In one sentence he's declaring someone else's opinion on it as pop-sci than offers his own similarly silly take on it. Oh wait he showed some charts. I did like seeing that people with more skill saw themselves as better than people with less skill, but conjecture on what people want to think of themselves? That's pop-sci.

<comment><USER6> > _Author 's take on Dunning-Kruger is a strawman. I haven't seen that version > be a "meme"._

The latter doesn't make it a strawman. Perhaps you've just haven't read the same posts/comments the author has read -- or as many.

Here:

1) Top voted definition from the urbandictionary: "A phenomenon where people with little knowledge or skill think they know more or have more skill than they do."

2) Article on OpenCulture website, titled "John Cleese on How "Stupid People Have No Idea How Stupid They Are" (a.k.a. the Dunning-Kruger Effect)".

3) Article in the online outlet unbiased.co.uk: "This behavioural concept (the discovery of which won the Ig Nobel Prize in 2000) describes the tendency of people who know very little to believe they know a lot. "

4) LinkedIn post: "Charles Darwin once said that ignorance tends to beget more confidence than knowledge. In a nutshell, it explains the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is a cognitive bias where incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their skill, cannot perceive the magnitude of their own inadequacy and will admit to their lack of ability only when they are trained in that particular skill."

5) Another popular blog: "The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Are the Stupid Too Stupid to Realize They're Stupid?"

6) The Dunning-Kruger effect represents a cognitive bias under the influence of which relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is.

I could go on for ages...

> _I feel like most people that I 've seen bring DK up understand what the > implications of it are._

You'd be surprised.

I actually don't get your comment, it's like you feel defensive and try to defend a psychological finding from being called a "meme".

First, it's not like the DK effect is a person and will feel bad.

Second, the internet is rampant with people who casually mention the DK effect in comments and posts and articles while not understanding fully what it is about.

> _In one sentence he 's declaring someone else's opinion on it as pop-sci > than offers his own similarly silly take on it. Oh wait he showed some > charts._

Some charts based on the original research, and more faithful to its conclusions and reportings than the pop-sci adaptation the author talks against. So?

<comment><USER7> It _is_ a strawman. Your quotes don't say what the author wrote: "the less someone knows about a subject, the more they think they know". And again later: "In two of the four cases, there's an obvious positive correlation between perceived skill and actual skill, which is the opposite of the pop-sci conception of Dunning-Kruger." He is specifically talking about an expectation of an _inverted_ relationship - a negative correlation - and his whole argument is based on that.

By his definition, the "meme" would mean people believe that those who are among the worst in the world at something would estimate their ability the highest, and those who are among the best would estimate their ability the lowest (on average).

Do you really think people believe this? That olympic gold medalist swimmers would put themselves in the first percentile of fastest swimmers, while people who've never entered water would put themselves in the 99th (well, not necessarily 1st and 99th - maybe it's 3rd and 97th, but the medalists would choose the lowest number, and the non-swimmers the highest)? I don't think I know a single person who believes this.

I have huge respect for Dan Luu but he screwed up here and created a classic strawman.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article touches on one of the highest-payback practices I've developed over the last few years: going to the original sources. I am constantly rewarded by this; typically finding out that the downstream analysis misunderstood some aspect, latched on to only a fraction of the whole story, or willfully misrepresented by speculating on absent data or by inserting a plausible narrative for items that fit a private agenda.

<comment><USER9> It's very scary.

Almost every time I check some thing in the news or public opinion, it's either wrong, misinterpreted or too simplified. Often it's just people talking from their ass. It's amazing how we can word as a society.

<comment><USER10> _" Almost every time I check some thing in the news or public opinion, it's either wrong, misinterpreted or too simplified"_

I'd attribute that to the decline of real (read professional) journalism, not an actual decline of society. People have been talking from their asses probably for as long as they can speak, but Internet allowed them to bypass usual bullshit meters.

<comment><USER11> It may be worth reading "The Chief", a bio of William Randolph Hearst then. Follow that with outright political slander in newspapers in the 19th Century.

Even Walter Cronkite might oughta not said what he did w.r.t. Vietnam. More time to pull out would have saved lives, and many, many people have felt very badly about that. That one is complicated.

No doubt that the sheer quantity of "news" has dragged more muck off the bottom of the barrel, but the good old days weren't so good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The static typing example seems weird to me. I did not read the entire linked summary but only the first five and last three papers discussed there and they mostly hint at at least some positive effect for static typing but the author of the summary essentially just dismisses the results for various reasons. I am not saying that all the judgments in the summary are necessarily wrong but overall that summary seems a pretty strange basis for saying that static typing is worth nothing. And the author of the submission is also the author of the summary.

<comment><USER4> Because the author has an agenda, he's a dynamic typing and unit testing proponent. Do not expect anything even distantly resembling any kind of an objective science from someone who clearly is not interested in facts.

<comment><USER13> This is pretty much a personal attack and those are not allowed here.

Also, what you're saying doesn't match my recollection of luu's writings on this topic, which is that he's mildly in favor of static typing but changed his mind somewhat after looking at the dismal state of the evidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The type system question is different from the psychological examples: the problem is not people misinterpreting evidence, but that reliable empirical evidence simply does not exist. Papers on the matter are sparse, completely uneven and full of methodological issues.

Personally, I'd argue that "statically typed" vs "dynamically typed" does not even make sense as a single question. There's more difference between Haskell and Java than between Java and Python, and an experiment comparing two identical languages with and without static typing won't tell us much beyond _those two languages_. (I recall seeing at least one paper that did this; it's probably worth reading, but not for making broader conclusions.)

Moreover, there simply isn't a compelling way to measure most of the things that programmers actually care about like expressiveness, productivity or safety. Existing measures (like counting bugs, lines of code over time, experiments on small tasks often performed by students... etc) are limited, full of confounding variables and quite indirect in measuring what people actually care about. I've looked through various studies and experiments in software engineering and while _some_ are compelling, many are little more than dressed-up anecdotes or "experience reports".

It's especially hard to study these things in the _contexts_ that matter. What we care about is experienced programmers who've used specific technologies for years applying them in teams, at scale. What's easy to experiment on is people who've just learned something using it on tiny tasks. Observational studies that aim at the broader industry context are interesting but hard to generalize because of confounding variables and difficulty of measurement.

In the absence of this sort of evidence, people have to make decisions _somehow_ , and it's not surprising that they overstate their confidence. We see this in pretty much everything else that doesn't have a strong empirical basis like questions around organizing workplaces, teams and processes. Just look at opinions people have about open offices, specific agile processes or interview procedures!

Another side to the question is that languages inevitably have a strong aesthetic component, and talking about aesthetics is difficult. But you're certainly not going to convince anyone on aesthetic matters with an experiment or observational study, any more than you can expect to accomplish anything like that in the art world!

</comment><comment><USER15> Something I didn't realize before is that, meme or not, Dunning-Kruger tested perception vs skill on _basic_ tasks, things that if someone asked me I might easily mistake my own ability, since it's something I'd feel like I should know how to do.

Ability to recognize humor isn't what I'd even call a skilled subject matter, and it's not something we learn in school or normally get exposed to graded metrics or comparisons against other people.

These aren't highly skilled subjects like Geophysics or Law or Electrical Engineering or Art History. I'd be willing to bet it's a lot easier to both self-identify lack of ability and admit lack of ability in a subject the more skilled it is.

</comment><comment><USER16> I like to think SMBC[1] presents a more accurate graph of confidence vs knowledge, but I don't know enough to really speak about it.

[1]: [http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2475](http://www.smbc- comics.com/?id=2475)

<comment><USER17> Quantifying the subtleties of knowledge as experience increases is difficult. For instance, one might understand the details but not compositional complexities. Or vice versa. But comparing the two situations is difficult and inextricably contextual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> John Oliver did an awesome bit recently on scientific studies and how popular conceptions of them, especially media portrayals, completely distort the results.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw)

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm curious as to why nobody here has yet to comment on OPs claims about "Hedonic Adaptation". I've been told by various sources that this is the way the brain works, even in my recent biology class where the teacher would say that "dopamine sensitivity" was to blame.

It seems like a really big deal to me if he's right, and could really change your outlook on life.

</comment><comment><USER19> D-K is one of my favorite patterns. This is the first time I've seen these charts. Some questions about methodology:

The x-axis shows quartile, not score results. If the range was between 80 and 90%, then all participants were accurate in assessing their ability as "above average". [EDIT] I doubt that's the case, but would rather see scores.

How was the self declared expertise in "humor" judged? That seems pretty subjective. Maybe the subject is hilarious to his or her friends.

Did the subject know what the examiner's definition of "logical reasoning" is? Was that street logic or discrete structures? What if the subject was able to glance at the test questions? Only then answer the question as it pertains to the test. How would the results change?

Grammar is idiomatic. In some places "over yonder" is contextually concise. Other grammatical forms may never occur. How is self-assessment over tacit expertise judged? Maybe another glance at the test?

Maybe Dunning-Kruger shows that there is a disconnect in how examiner and subject interpret a question? Maybe, it is a matter of saving face in saying that you're above average? Maybe, because the subjects are college students, that they actually are above average? Or maybe, these are above average participants that aren't quite sure of the question, so they say that they're above average?

</comment><comment><USER20> The idea that there's an inverse relationship between how much someone thinks they know about a subject and how much they actually know is pretty timeless. When people refer to Dunning-Kruger I take it to mean shorthand for that phenomena rather than a reference to results from a specific study done in 1999.

I may be misremembering, but when I first saw references to it on Slashdot, etc., it was from people reacting in amusement that someone was able to quantify and measure what seemed like such a commonly experienced aspect of human behavior. If someone had done an academic study on the increased likelihood of friends having scheduling and availability issues around weekends in which one friend was moving to a new house but was too cheap to get movers despite having plenty of money to do so, it would've gotten a similar response. :)

Since then, it's just been convenient having a name ("Dunning-Kruger", that is) for a concept that was widely understood but didn't have shorthand for referring to it. I'm not surprised that the study itself wasn't definitive and airtight.

</comment><comment><USER21> One thing I never see in the income/happiness studies is - Is this just for a single person, or is it for a family? And if for a family, then what size is that family? I can see being happy earning 75k/year and being single, but not so much if I have eight other family members to support with that same salary. Is there some sort of "number of people being supported on this income" adjustment to the income/happiness studies?

<comment><USER22> At least one study uses household income [1]. The effect isn't adjusted for family size in any way I can see. Do note that the linked study differentiates between 'enjoyment of life' which they estimate starts to plateau around $75k / household and 'life satisfaction' which keeps going up with earnings [2]. That difference may explain much of the supposed controversy as outlined in the original post.

[1] [http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489.full#T2](http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489.full#T2)

[2] [http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2010/07/02/money-can-buy- satisfa...](http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2010/07/02/money-can-buy-satisfaction- if-not-happiness/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This article had more assumptions in it than examples of assumptions it was complaining about.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Apparently, there's a dollar value which not only makes you happy, it makes > you as happy as it is possible for humans to be.

> If people rebound from both bad events and good, how is it that making more > money causes people to be happier?

I saw graphs that proved happiness causes money. What did you see?

disclaimer: I am trying to be snide on the internet. What I mean to say is that I was confused by the use of the word "cause".

<comment><USER25> I see graphs that proved that being born into a financially well-off family with access to good education might have something to do with factors involved in the graph.

(Appreciated your humor. Am attempting a mildly humorous speculation about a plausible cause for both factors. It's probably less humorous than I think it is, but as someone lacking skill in humor, I overestimate my own hilarity.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Here's a link to the original paper.

[http://psych.colorado.edu/~vanboven/teaching/p7536_heurbias/...](http://psych.colorado.edu/~vanboven/teaching/p7536_heurbias/p7536_readings/kruger_dunning.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER27> Dan Ariely and his team has done some great work on the "happiness" meme, and they generally support the popular notion that there are massively diminishing returns to accruing wealth. Yes, (as this post shows) happiness does continue to increase as you accrue wealth, but there are other things that you can do - including giving money AWAY - whose returns on happiness and satisfaction do not diminish. The point is, if you take a long view on life and what to focus on, getting to a certain level of financial stability should take a high priority, but becoming incredibly wealthy should not.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is this a clever ruse to test whether we'll read the cited sources? ;^)

</comment><comment><USER29> All the income happiness data seems to stop shortly after 64k. Hardly evidence that there is no plateau.

<comment><USER30> If you click on the link "is robust across every country studied, too", there is data up to and above 500k for the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Was ok up until type systems. Please stop citing this pathetic "empirical study" already, it's totally unscientific.

<comment><USER31> If that one is not, are there any scientific studies then?

Strongly typed languages require of me to do more work upfront, to satisfy their type checker. They must necessarily reject programs that would work correctly. In this process a lot of mistakes are eliminated, and this gives me more confidence that the result will work. I like that way of working. But does it produce more robust code? Is it more productive? It feels like it, but that doesn't mean it's true.

<comment><USER32> "Strongly typed" is not the same thing as "statically typed". Most dynamically typed languages are strongly typed, too. The distinction between static and dynamic type systems comes from whether type errors are caught at compilation time or run time.

Which basically settles the question for me as a programmer, anyway. Eliminating the possibility of a class of run time failures -- how can that not be a good thing?

<comment><USER31> I meant statically typed, thanks.

The question to me is not whether type checkers are useful tools, but at what point they become a hindrance. If I may rephrase your question: The programs rejected by the type checker, how can they not be bad programs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I love that the people who come into the comments to argue about the benefits of static typing seem to have totally missed the point that the post argues that you need _evidence_ , not just beliefs.

<comment><USER4> Empirical evidence is nearly impossible in this area.

On the other hand, we have a solid _theory_ , not some "beliefs". If you want to dismiss the entire PL theory, you have to try really hard to justify such a stupid move first. The problem is, most of the dynamic proponents know next to nothing about the PL theory anyway.

<comment><USER33> > Empirical evidence is nearly impossible in this area.

Then stop arguing as if you have evidence. It's really that simple.

Present something that is not derived from opinion and speculation and make this an argument that is not subjective.

For what it's worth, I prefer static, strong type systems and I was recently dreaming out loud about strong, static typing in erlang with a colleague. I don't confuse my opinion and speculation in what's good and not with fact, though, which is the big difference.

> If you want to dismiss the entire PL theory, you have to try really hard to > justify such a stupid move first.

It's a _fact_ that there exists no definite proof of the objective superiority of static, strong typing. I don't need to "dismiss the entire PL theory" (what a silly thing to even say; not all PL theory is concerned with types).

You've come exactly 0.0% closer to showing any kind of evidence, empirical or not, and have only speculated more (on the value of static, strong type systems and of the skill and knowledge of people who disagree with you).

<comment><USER4> > Please, do present the solid theory that is not simply derived from > speculation and opinion.

What theory shows is enough to claim superiority:

1) Dynamic typing is a subset of a static typing. This thing alone is enough.

2) Static typing provides _more_ semantic options in both compile and run time, meaning that you can do more diverse things. Also quite a strong claim for superiority.

<comment><USER33> > 1) Dynamic typing is a subset of a static typing. This thing alone is > enough.

This is like saying that more syntax is better. No, cutting away from something can make it better. This argument is not at all enough to claim superiority.

(C can be considered a subset of C++. Which is better?)

> 2) Static typing provides more semantic options in both compile and run > time, meaning that you can do more diverse things. Also quite a strong claim > for superiority.

"More diverse things" is ill defined. Which are they and why are they a net win? This is not at all a strong claim for anything, except "There is more".

<comment><USER4> > No, cutting away from something can make it better

What?!?

You can build a dynamic type system on top of a static one. The opposite is impossible. What else is there to even talk about?

> "More diverse things" is ill defined.

It is very well defined. Static (i.e., compile time) metadata allows to infer _constraints_ in compile time. Dynamic metadata is useless for deriving constraints. A very obvious consequence of this observation is that there will always be far more boilerplate with dynamic typing than with static.

<comment><USER33> > You can build a dynamic type system on top of a static one. The opposite is > impossible. What else is there to even talk about?

We are talking about the value of different kinds of type systems and using them. Being able to build a dynamic one on top of a static one says very little about whether or not dynamic or static typing is better for actual usage. On top of this lots of languages have added gradual typing, so this idea that you cannot take a language that is not statically typed and add a type system seems misguided.

> A very obvious consequence of this observation is that there will always be > far more boilerplate with dynamic typing than with static.

I hope you realize that this is not at all what reality looks like.

<comment><USER4> > We are talking about the value of different kinds of type systems and using > them.

Exactly. And you're apparently suggesting that there may not be a single case where you may want static constraints. Kinda very strong position, needs very strong proofs indeed.

> gradual typing

Gradual typing IS a static typing, period.

> you cannot take a language that is not statically typed and add a type > system seems misguided.

What?!?

You cannot build a gradual typing system _on top_ of a dynamic one.

> this is not at all what reality looks like.

I can only conclude that you do not know much about the reality if you think so.

<comment><USER33> > Exactly. And you're apparently suggesting that there may not be a single > case where you may want static constraints.

No, I have consistently asked for objective proof that static typing is a net win over dynamic typing, something you have yet to even address. I don't know if you're intentionally misrepresenting my argument or if you're simply misunderstanding it, but I think you should re-read this whole thread.

As I've said previously, I prefer static strong typing, but I'm also in touch with reality and to present my opinion and speculation as some kind of fact isn't something I'm interested in.

> I can only conclude that you do not know much about the reality if you think > so.

If we're jumping to conclusions I'd like to conclude that you think all PL theory is type theory and that you're ignorant of every other bit of it (and also that you're the type of person to think your every opinion is fact. I think both of these have been on display in this thread, so I actually think that's a stronger conclusion than the one you've drawn).

<comment><USER4> Sorry, cannot reply down the thread, so I'll put my answer here:

> This is not necessarily true: Static typing quite often requires you to > satisfy the type system

We're talking about static typing in general, not some particular implementation of it.

Any static type system with an "anything" type (think of the System.Object in .NET, for example) allows a transparent fallback to dynamic at any time.

So, claiming that "there is a cost" is an outright lie.

> I haven't stated that dynamic typing is better, but I have stated that > people claiming one or the other need to have proof.

You know, there is a little funny thingy called "logic". And one of the most common tricks in logic is a proof by contradiction. When you're asking for a proof that static typing is superior, the simplest way is to start with "let's assume dynamic typing is superior". This is exactly what I did. Unfortunately, you could not follow.

> If your programs are as airtight as the "proof" you've given here, I'm not > sure I ever want to use them.

It's understandable that a person who do not know much about type systems in particular and PL theory in general also apparently does not know much about proofs and logic in general. After all, type theory and proof theory are indistinguishable.

<comment><USER33> > You know, there is a little funny thingy called "logic". And one of the most > common tricks in logic is a proof by contradiction. When you're asking for a > proof that static typing is superior, the simplest way is to start with > "let's assume dynamic typing is superior". This is exactly what I did. > Unfortunately, you could not follow.

Condescending, but not to be confused with correct. I'll try as well:

Given your obviously limited knowledge and familiarity with English I can understand that you seem to have issues understanding my basic argument, but I'll restate it for you:

If you are trying to claim something as superior, you need to provide actual reasons for it, not just speculation.

I hope you followed that.

> It's understandable that a person who do not know much about type systems in > particular and PL theory in general also apparently does not know much about > proofs and logic in general. After all, type theory and proof theory are > indistinguishable.

It's actually not understandable that someone who claims to have a lot of knowledge in type systems and type theory, as well as logic, to provide "proof" that in no way proves what was asked for. It's also surprising that someone who claims to be so well versed in PLT essentially says it's all type theory.

It's understandable if a person with reading comprehension issues would have problems reading this post, so if you have any questions regarding it (or the previous posts), feel free to ask.

<comment><USER4> It is very childish and stupid to respond to a proof with a shit like "no, this is not a proof".

> The idea that static type systems are better to use (in general) because you > can make dynamic type systems on top of them is simply not something you can > just say and then have taken as fact.

Oh, did not realise you're _so_ incompetent (although I should have guessed after your epic fail with the gradual typing). Do I have to prove that 2+2=4 too?

Once again: dynamic typing is a subset of static typing and therefore it is _less powerful_. Period. You cannot do anything with this fact.

Also, funny that you did not respond to my accusation that you believe that type systems are only for "validity checking". Which suggests that I was right.

<comment><USER13> We bent over backwards not to ban you, gave you lots of warnings and cut you tons more slack than we usually do. You're aware of how unacceptable it is to post comments like this to HN, and still you did it repeatedly in this thread, turning a large section of it into a toxic waste dump.

Obviously, your account is now banned. If you don't want it to be banned, you can email us at firstname.lastname@example.com, but please don't do that until you're sincerely committed to never spoiling HN like this again.

<comment><USER34> This kind of moderatorial bickering does not belong on HN.

<comment><USER34> And now you're disagreeing by downvoting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> But type systems do help. You don't have to go far to notice the shortcomings of any large enough project written in python, ruby, javascript, etc. Whereas a project of equivalent scale written in c#, typescript, java, dart, etc. is much easier to maintain and debug. So given enough discipline and enough good programmers I agree that there isn't much difference but in practice this is not the case and having the compiler double check your work helps a lot.</comment>


Announcing Dive: a todo list that helps you break down big tasks - <AUTHOR> https://divein.io/ <comment><USER2> Since there seems to be little detail without having to create an account: What are the key features of this? It seems similar to Workflowy or DynaList, but I'm not currently seeing anything in the little video that shows how it provides something that either of those applications don't. This isn't meant to disparage, but I would like to know why I would want to potentially move my work out of one of those into this, or put something in this that isn't there because of something it offers that helps with a certain type of task.</comment>


Craft – FREE Tool for Product Managers - <AUTHOR> https://craft.io/ <comment><USER2> why do people scroll hijack like this, it makes checking out the site so slow

<comment><AUTHOR> you never know what is in web-designer`s mind ;)</comment></comment>


Toyota announces sustainable vehicle ecosystem [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrLfxz7daSU <comment><USER2> First two aspects are good. Battery sharing can really scale well and decrease production costs by standardization. And, a shared vehicle can reduce traffic amongst many other benefits.

"Information Sharing" \- No thanks. I don't want a shared vehicle to be able to watch me go into my house. The more I see the future of increased connectivity, the more I detest it. I want technology to solve hard problems but without butchering people's right to privacy and undeserved pervasive intrusion in people's lives. I don't want a single IOT device in my house. No IOT locks, bulbs, fridges, coffee makers, speakers and... cars. I am almost angry thinking about the future.

The last point almost reads like satire in the video. Also, videos like this are 100% useless. It is fluff but no substance. Give us detailed plans, schedule, specifics on _how_ you'll achieve all this, technology whitepapers. This video is utterly and completely useless.

</comment><comment><USER3> That seemed more like a high school project than the output of the world's largest auto maker. I don't understand what they're trying to tell me, other than perhaps "Toyota hired a futurist and an animator and told them to make a YouTube video."

Also, can anyone explain the "The Future Is Slow" tagline at the end? It was jarring and made me wonder if the whole thing is supposed to be parody.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is there anything other than this oversimplified Youtube cartoon describing this? Is this a battery swap system, or what?

Battery swapping seems to be an obsolete technology. Battery capacities are now big enough, and charging is fast enough, that it's not worth the hassle.

<comment><USER5> It'd be just perfect for Toyota, then, once they give up on Hydrogen, The Fuel Of The Future.

<comment><USER6> I was going to say this - Toyota gave up on batteries after building the Prius.

Their hydrogen fuel cell is clearly not the way the industry is going. So are they going back to batteries, the tech they said would never be commercially viable?

<comment><USER7> Wait. I thought their hydrogen cars were hybrid cars, just like the prius. Why do you say they gave up on batteries ?

<comment><USER8> Kinda.

H2EV don't "burn" the hydrogen, because fuel cells are much better than engines that burn stuff in cylinders. So you end up with electormotor and fuel cell.

And since you can recuperate into fuel cell and fuel cells aren't very good at providing big short peaks of power, it makes sense to add a battery to smooth things out and to store energy when braking.

But the battery doesn't need high-capacity, because it's just a temporary store of energy. It's a very different battery technology than what you find in a Tesla or Kia e-Niro or whatever.

In the end, Toyota H2EV (Mirai) is basically 1) electromotor from Lexus hybrid 2) battery from Prius 3) Fuel cell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "They can also learn their owners' habits and anticipate peoples' needs - unlocking doors as they approach, reminding them of errands and appointments, and using AI to suggest new destinations and activities to enjoy."

What does that have anything to do with a vision based on battery sharing?

</comment><comment><USER10> Standardisation is good - if it's adopted by others. Hopefully this one is as I see a need for it.

Though, I can also see this happening: "None of the old standards are good enough, let's create a new standard", and now there are N+1 standards.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is unmitigated bullshit. A huge PR stunt.

Sharing batteries doesn't work. That's why Tesla dropped it even though the cars are designed to have batteries swapped in minutes. The only way for battery swaps to work is if truly nobody owns their own car. Which brings me to the next point.

Nobody wants to share their fucking car in America. Your car is your best friend in 90 percent of the country. Nobody wants dirty strangers fucking up their cars. Nobody wants the bed bugs, scabies, dandruff flakes and all the rest. Not to mention crumbs and garbage. It's bullshit. There will never be widespread car sharing. People have been stroking themselves to this idea for a Fucking decade.

And when they started showing images of the car CATCHING INTRUDERS and opening your door for you, my bullshit alarm rang so loud it fucking exploded. We already depend on a pile of broken bullshit taped together with scotch tape. Taking the disaster that is the IOT and using it to open your door WITH YOUR CAR is a stupid and bad idea and everyone knows it except the idiots at Toyota PR.

Toyota has been making the wrong moves for decades. They INSISTED on making the murai even when it was clear that hydrogen wasn't going to cut it. The EV revolution is here and all Toyota has is their pathetic failed hydrogen vehicle and the rav4 that they have cancelled and hamstrung multiple times. Meanwhile all the other big players have been busy getting pure EVs on the lot.

This is solar roadways levels of bullshit!

<comment><USER12> > _Toyota has been making the wrong moves for decades._

Have they? Then why are they among the top three car companies in the world and why is Toyota the top selling car brand? The Toyota Corolla was the second best selling car model in the world in 2018:

[https://www.jato.com/global-car-market-remains-stable- during...](https://www.jato.com/global-car-market-remains-stable- during-2018-as-continuous-demand-for-suvs-offsets-decline-in-sales-of-compact- cars-and-mpvs/)

I don't think these things would be true if Toyota had really been "making the wrong moves for decades".

I think a much more likely scenario is that Toyota knows more about the car business than you do.

<comment><USER13> Yes, Toyota is one of the best performing car companies in the world. I don't know what the parent comment is referring to either.

By the way, my only criticism against Toyota would be that their cars don't always seem to keep up with the style and aesthetics trends. However, their newer Yaris for example reminds me of a samurai helmet, which to me looks good. On that front I think there is room for improvement to challenge how we think a toyota should "look".

Apart from that, I think they are performing very well.

EDIT: The same holds for when they release EVs. The Prius is an unattractive car, but it did sell well despite (or because of) that.

<comment><USER14> My only criticisms of Toyotas/Lexii (thanks Alan Partridge) are that they're 5 years late on Carplay, and have stuck with the efficient but unpleasant geartrains for too long on their hybrids.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Any other brand is trying to create a platform like this ? Beside Tesla, obv.

</comment><comment><USER16> Looks more like an ad to me.</comment>


UFC Pirate Ordered to Pay $32m in Damages Says He Was Bullied and Paid Nothing - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/ufc-pirate-ordered-to-pay-32m-in-damages-says-he-was-bullied-paid-nothing-200802/ <comment><USER2> > "Are you trying to tell me that people who can barely pay their bills should > not be able to show support for your product if they so choose?"

This is laughable. I'm an avid torrentor, but I don't delude myself into thinking what I'm doing is good for the copyright holder.

<comment><USER3> I mean HN probably skews towards people who could easily afford the subscription, but it could be a legitimate benefit to the UFC brand to maintain the engagement of fans who can't afford to pay. Those people may lose interest if they can't watch at all, but they might be able to afford the subscription in a few years. High school/college students are one demographic that comes to mind, but this could easily apply to adults trying to escape poverty as well.

I don't know which way the balance swings in terms of people who can afford to pay and choose not to vs. people who can't afford to pay, but I think with something like the UFC that relies to some degree on fan culture for its appeal there's a clear benefit from having more people watch it even if those additional viewers don't pay.

<comment><USER2> Aren't there pubs or restaurants that air these for non-subscribers, like they do for soccer/football?

<comment><USER4> There are, but it's pretty expensive for the bar. $1200 for a single event, 8 years ago: [https://www.bloodyelbow.com/2012/8/10/3233243/new-light- shed...](https://www.bloodyelbow.com/2012/8/10/3233243/new-light-shed-on- closed-circuit-ufc-broadcasts-at-bars)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's funny how the world changes, they went to such great lengths to target one pirate, but nowdays you can pirate UFC streams by literally googling it while the event is on, or just hanging out on twitter or reddit catching links before they're deleted.

(I know this because I buy every PPV via Fightpass, and probably 10-25% of the time the official app fails at least once, and won't log back in for 10-30 minutes, usually leading up to hyped up fights.)

<comment><USER6> Are PPV fights discounted if you have Fightpass?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This brings up an interesting angle on the sorts of eye-watering settlement amounts levied against teenagers we read about so often. Are they all setup this way? Do the rights holders expect to be paid or are they happy to announce an insane sum + gag order and call the issue settled?

<comment><USER8> Seems like a nice way of teaching them a lesson without being completely harsh. The thing the kid here doesn't understand, they get caught for pirating again by another organization, that set of lawyers now have documentation that they didn't learn their lesson from their last tango. They will pursue full damages and collect since any public apology will be meaningless.

And yea, there are settlements like this. For one, to hold certain IP rights, you have to defend them, even if you dont want to. Because if you dont, someone else can use that as a case you're not protecting your IP, thus party 2 can go around and sell it without legal recourse. This was a slap on the wrist that actually makes me like the UFC even more now.

<comment><USER9> >>For one, to hold certain IP rights, you have to defend them, even if you dont want to.

That has been a myth around Trademark for a long time, and it is a false hood [1], I am saddened that this myth is now spreading to Copyright law as well. There is no provision of copyright that would mandate a copyright holder to relentlessly police the internet finding all infringement less they loose their copyright. That simply does not exist at all so I would recommend not representing this fake information

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does- not...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not-require- companies-tirelessly-censor-internet)

<comment><USER10> You do have to defend Trademarks, but only in egregious cases. According to the article you linked, you can lose a trademark if it becomes a generic term (zipper, xerox a document, etc), or you completely stop using it for multiple years.

So, there are some nuances. However, courts have repeatedly ruled you do not need to levy lawsuits at everyone that uses your trademark.

In fact, if your defense is so egregiously over-aggressive, you may be liable due to misuse of trademark.

Unfortunately, while they could do so in theory, the US has never revoked a trademark in such cases.

If they started doing that, it would put an end to SLAPP trademark suits, and a lot of lawyers would be out of work.

<comment><USER11> It's worse than that, because overly aggressive defence of trademarks isn't punished yet not defending it _could_ theoretically cost a business their trademark, it skews the system so, for businesses, it's more beneficial to be aggressive.

(I certainly wouldn't want to be the person that said "their fine to use our trademark. We have nothing to worry about" only to unexpectedly end up losing the trademark)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I never apologized...I only signed a legal agreement that allowed an apology to be issued in my name.

Christ, what an asshole.

<comment><USER13> Wow, I'm shocked by your anger. His disowning the petty concept of a legal apology written in his name seems totally reasonable, mostly because the recipient is _the UFC_ , and not an individual who suffered any kind of legitimate harm.

<comment><USER12> OK, maybe I was a little harsh. But it doesn't matter who the aggrieved party is. He took an action, and now he's trying to weasel out of it by saying, in effect, "yeah, but I had my fingers crossed behind my back, so it doesn't count."

I am reacting to his utter inability to take responsibility for his actions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone know how he got caught

<comment><USER4> I don't know how he was caught, but he did do an interview that explained the tools and methods he was using: [https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-debut-super- smooth-video-to...](https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-debut-super-smooth-video- torrents-130428/) (His online name is "Secludedly").

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So they want people to pay for the crap that is UFC? You couldn't pay me to watch it. Watching people bleed all over each other and getting hit in the head until they lose consciousness is sick and takes some sickos to enjoy watching it.

</comment><comment><USER16> You have to be at least a little tech-savvy to capture content and upload it, so why don't pirates take basic precautions like driving to a public access point before uploading?

<comment><USER4> I always assumed they would have a VPN or VPS in a country that doesn't have to listen to the UFC.</comment></comment>


PHP Has No Culture of Testing - <AUTHOR> http://sebastian-bergmann.de/archives/779-PHP-Has-No-Culture-of-Testing.html <comment><USER3> Why does a language have to have a culture of testing? If you are a good engineer, you will find a way to test your code, even if it means really going out of your way to test your code. For example, there really isn't an easy way to test kernel code written in C, so some people embed a Tcl interpreter in their C code, write some tcl command handlers, and use the tcltest package to test.

Just because your cute little framework created some test file placeholders for you doesn't mean you're going to write good code, or good tests.

<comment><USER4> Having a good culture is important for various things, in my opinion. It doesn't guarantee code is good, of course, but by creating expectations that things should be done a certain way, I think that on average, it does make a language more attractive.

Case in point: Tcl and Tk made it vastly easier to create GUI's, but there was little to no culture of getting design right, no guidance about how to make a _good_ UI, and that came back to bite Tk because people came to associate it with ugly GUIs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> great article, but php bashing is akin to a class war, and yea sure - <USER2> upper classes are more secure (trustworthy) than the lowers ha?</comment>


Can a California town move back from the sea? - <AUTHOR> https://www.hcn.org/issues/50.17/climate-change-can-a-california-town-move-back-from-the-sea-imperial-beach <comment><USER2> According to Ben Shapiro, yes, you just need to sell the former beachfront property to whoever buys houses that are underwater and then you can move further in-land.

Or, y'know, enforce regulations against businesses to cut back on climate change, but that's practically communism.</comment>


Queuing theory books on line - <AUTHOR> http://web2.uwindsor.ca/math/hlynka/qonline.html <comment><USER2> Is _online_ being spelled "on line" intended to be a pun?

<comment><USER3> Sure! You use a line to queue theory books.</comment></comment>


Researchers spot planet-eating white dwarfs - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/05/galactus-like-white-dwarfs-may-eat-planets.ars <comment><USER2> oops... I parsed the title wrong. I didn't notice the hyphen. I thought it was curious that a planet would be eating white dwarfs.</comment>


The tool that birthed and will kill fake news - <AUTHOR> http://s670779681.websitehome.co.uk/how-the-internet-created-and-killed-fake-news <comment><USER2> The problem is, those AI tools will be designed to recognize the narratives of their creators as truth, not actual Truth.</comment>


Jobs in the Real World 101 & Software Engineers - <AUTHOR>

What language and what will i be performing if i go into the computer programming field? I am heading to college next year and I want to get some practice before then.I have been going to monster.com and typing in software engineers. I want to practice doing real world programming and seeing how it is. Can someone give me some tips on what languages most companies want employees to know and what jobs they will performing. What languages do you recommend me learning for the real world in the job field? What will I be doing in the job field? <comment><USER2> The real world is a varied place, and monster.com is not a uniform sample in my experience. One thing you'll find in the real world is corporate IT programming. This slice is well-represented on monster. You'll probably not have a shot at those jobs without a college degree; you can intern in those places with junior standing or so. Corporate IT jobs are mostly about simulating paperwork in computer systems to reduce handling costs. Java, C#, and VB.NET are popular languages.

Another slice of the real world is full of tech companies. Again, big companies will demand credentials. They will care more that your major is actually relevant and that you graduated from the right school compared to a non-tech company. But, tech companies are better able to discern actual skill and talent than non-tech companies. So, particularly in small tech companies, they won't actually require formal credentials if it's clear that you'll perform well. Tech companies by definition have to innovate to survive, so they're about solving all sorts of problems that haven't been satisfactorily solved before. C++ and Java are popular languages, but there's more diversity here than in IT.

There are lots of small businesses that need software for something. They will often advertise one-off projects and wind up using coders from low-wage countries. There are lots of terrible programmers working for low prices, but if you don't care about making money you could compete with them for coding jobs just to get the experience. In the real world, there's a lot of terrible code whose owners need bug fixes and new features. There are also many terrible coders who promise the world and work for rock-bottom prices. So all around, that could be an eye-opening experience.

"The real world" is often used in contrast to academia, but it's silly to deny the legitimacy or practical benefit of basic research. There are university and commercial labs where researchers do really imaginative thinking and lots of experimental work to develop new programming languages or techniques. These places normally require advanced degrees and plenty of evidence of your brilliance and ability to convince other people that your ideas are interesting. They write a lot of math and prose and demos or experiments, but normally someone else turns the most promising ideas into mass-market products. Researchers don't care so much about maintainability, so they often favor languages that provide individual power (think lisp) over group safety (java). They are a well-educated and smart group, so they don't fear coq or haskell. C++ is pretty popular in certain circles, but generally this group cares least about agreeing to use any particular language.

I suggest you find a free software project that makes software you personally enjoy using, and contribute to that. You can start today, without formal credentials. Hopefully, you can find such a project whose members care about mentoring! Maybe <http://code.google.com/soc/> is a good place to start looking. Anyway, you can learn plenty about the reality of software engineering by studying a free software project. Learn the language they use, read their design documentation to see what they think the most important properties and relationships in the codebase are, see how they manage bug reports and feature requests, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> My advice: Get really good at C in linux. Focus on learning about cool algorithms and datastructures (hash tables, rb-trees, alpha-beta search, shift-reduce, ...) rather than the particulars of any language. If you get great at C programming in linux, and have a solid algorithmic foundation, then you'll be able to pick up the language-du-jour in a matter of days (if not hours).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sounds good! The problem I have is thinking of a program to write and then actually using the write code to write the program. Can someone help me with that one please? I appreciate all the hints!</comment>


The Unreal Engine: Building the Empire State Building with Playing Cards - <AUTHOR> http://kotaku.com/5339057/carmack-ok-with-id-not-becoming-an-epic-or-valve#c14826268

<comment><USER2> I used to work at epic on UE3 and can say that there's a LOT of engineering and considerations that go into keeping the engine flexible and usable for so many different types of games.

As a programmer on UE3, part of my job was spent responding to licensee questions on mailing lists (usually within a fixed timeframe), looking into bugs that held up QA'd releases (once a month code drops to licensees). Epic really does take the concerns of its licensees seriously. The idea is that helping licensees ship successful games using UE3 can only help Epic's business and image.

Also, one of UE3's biggest sell points was the tools. The tools are what helps get UE3 in the door over other tech. UnrealEd was designed to be WYSWIG and to help artists create as much content as possible with programmer intervention. Massive parallelization of teams is what helps save cash and ship games quickly this gen. However it's really up to the licensee to use the tech to its fullest. Many teams just take our demo tech and modify it a bit to meet their needs. The business reasons for doing this are obvious (ship fast!), but it's not really indicative of what the engine is fully capable of.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great comment. Instantly reminded me of Lewis CK's "Everything's Amazing, Nobody's Happy" video ([http://www.hulu.com/watch/60634/late-night-with-conan- obrien...](http://www.hulu.com/watch/60634/late-night-with-conan-obrien- everythings-amazing-nobodys-happy)).

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, that's a fantastic analogy.

Kudos to him (or her) for placing a real, reasoned response on a gaming blog as well.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great comment and speaks highly of HN for highlighting it as something worthy of note.

I think all comments, everywhere, deserve their own proper URL. Any takers?

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure "deserve" is the right word, considering the amount of thought that goes into most of them.

<comment><USER5> Hm, maybe I chose the wrong word. I meant that since comments are a discrete piece of information, I think they should have unique URLs, not just anchor tags or, worse, nothing.

I really like how this site enables linking directly to an individual comment - I've used that functionality many times to point friends at one I've found particularly insightful.

And who knows, maybe having their direct linkability emphasised in this way will act to increase the quality.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Show Your Personal Homepage - <AUTHOR> I love looking at homepages where you can see it was build by hand, hosting carefully collected and/or created content that goes back and is not just a snapshot of today like what we see on all the big services we use. I've been late to the game with https://h.43z.one but so far it's been a fun journey and it makes me proud to see it become what I like so much about other pages I've seen.<p>Show yours! <comment><USER2> [https://vtomole.com/](https://vtomole.com/)

I created mine 4 years ago so I could write about quantum computation. That was before I started contributing to Wikipedia. Now I mostly post non-quantum computation stuff on my homepage.</comment>


Buffett Proposed $3 Billion Uber Investment But Deal Crumbled - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-30/buffett-said-to-have-offered-uber-3-billion-but-talks-crumbled <comment><USER2> Here's a question: is there a kind of equilibrium that private companies like Uber can risk breaking in terms of ultimate public valuation by staying private for too long and taking too much investment pre-IPO?

If would-be shareholders have seen Buffet type investors going in (or attempting to go in) with absolutely colossal cash injections pre-IPO, might it appear like too much of the explosive growth potential has already been squeezed out before the IPO? And therefore there is less incentive to buy the stock speculatively, making the stock price lower at IPO. Isn't this a bad thing for investors looking to get in late stage? Put another way, could Buffet's investment have actually risked its own likelihood of eventually paying off, due to its size?

<comment><USER3> It could be the case, but quite unlikely.

As Buffett is a value investor, there's a very simple set of rules he follows that I recall learning from a similar-minded portfolio manager:

1) set a price the company should be valued at

2) pay less than that price

3) don't be wrong

So while Buffett's investment would be colossal and substantially raise the price of the company, all that investment says is that he thinks it is currently undervalued, and he likely isn't trying to throw enough money in Uber's direction to fix the entire pricing error, from a finance standpoint.

There would actually likely be more damage caused if value investors publicly turned down investing in a pre-IPO company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could someone explain what got Buffet interested in Uber?

<comment><USER5> Buffett's general MO is to find distressed or other undervalued companies and offer a large chunk of money, negotiating very favorable terms.

Take their deal with Bank of America, wherein they received preferred stock which paid 6% annual dividend (so they end up higher up the capital structure than the common) as well as a dilutive warrant to purchase 700M shares of common stock at a strike price of about $7 at any time until 2021 (currently at 29.49)

The article answers why the deal went sour:

> Coming so soon after that cash infusion, Buffett's attempt to take a stake > in Uber while it was on the rocks may have been too late to squeeze > favorable terms from the company.

Buffett probably couldn't get the type of deal he wanted, mostly because they were able to secure cash independently.

<comment><USER6> > Buffett's general MO is to find distressed or other undervalued companies > and offer a large chunk of money, negotiating very favorable terms.

Are there other viable strategies for a large investor? I can't imagine it's a very good plan to pay market value for shares in companies that are already currently very successful. By definition you're buying "at the top".

<comment><USER7> Buffett bought 75 million Apple shares last quarter, paying market price for a very successful company. His investment philosophy is based on making the distinction between the market price of something and its intrinsic value, and looking for discrepancies between the two [1].

[1] [https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/articles/columbia- business/sup...](https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/articles/columbia- business/superinvestors)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Buffet investment tricks are subtle [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett)

</comment><comment><USER9> How is it possible that Uber has $6.5bn in cash? Weren't they losing almost $4bn a year?

<comment><USER5> [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/uber](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/uber)

> Total Funding Amount: $21.7B

The real question is how companies thought it was a great idea to invest in them to the tune of $21.7B.

<comment><USER10> Worldwide consumer transportation monopoly

<comment><USER9> There's no barrier to entry.

Some people claim that there is a barrier to entry which is that "Uber has all the drivers". However every big city I go you see local players. Not only Lyft and Yandex, but regular cabs, or regular cabs dispatched by an app (as opposed to telephone) etc.

No barrier to entry.

<comment><USER11> No barrier to entry, yet despite two years of the most horrendous (and self inflicted) press imaginable, Uber still has a massively dominant position?

Reminds me of another company with no barrier to entry, Coke. It's massive profits led Sam awaiting to spend millions creating Sams Cola, which crushed Coke in taste tests and got massive distribution from the get-go. And utterly failed.

If you can understand the massive barriers to entry Coke really had, you'll begin to understand how massive Uber's competitive barriers are.

<comment><USER12> > Uber still has a massively dominant position

Are you confusing America for the world? Uber's position is not massively dominant in Europe, and they've pulled out of SE Asia with their tail between their legs because of a competitor.

<comment><USER11> MyTaxi is neck and neck with Iber in Europe, but doesn't exist in the US. Even after leaving a bunch of countries, overall Uber is by far the biggest rife sharing company in the first world. It's beating Lyft in the US by more than 5-1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Two questions:

1) Uber really needs 2008-style, extreme-terms cash right now?

2) Buffett team must be fairly annoyed with Uber's negotiating to leak the story?

<comment><USER11> 1) No, this is old news. Uber has years of cash. 2) if Buffett was annoyed he would not be commenting.

<comment><USER14> Well, Uber lost 4 billions, and has 6.5 in the bank + 1.5 promised, so two years. "Years" is technically correct, but with their burn rate and at this scale, I would not snub billionaires in their position.

I understand (from drawing similar models at Deliveroo) that you can actually predict quite well your demand, efficiency, maturity by city and have rather accurate loss prediction, and I suspect that Uber expects to loose less than 3 billions in 2018 (and try very hard to be profitable in the last quarter of 2019 prior to their IPO), and with that in mind, "years" makes more sense, but… that's like when a test pilot says 'things are fine' inches from disaster: still not a ride for everybody.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is this a new trend to access a page quickly via Google "+1"? - <AUTHOR>

I've noticed a couple internet pages that restrict immediate access to the site's content unless you "+1" their website.
Here's an example:
http://googleplusanswers.com/
The above website isn't even affiliated with Google! It irks me to take that extra step to bump up its rating when I haven't even visited the site yet!
What are your thoughts about this tactic? <comment><USER2> I think it is possibly the annoying and irresponsible business promotional tool anyone could implement. Many tried to do this to allow you to see videos on Facebook with "likes" as well.

<comment><USER3> agree completely annoying and wish there could be a way to flag these types of pages to google. Just close and don't ever visit again. You only perpetuate this behavior by giving in.

<comment><USER4> Here is Google's webspam report tool.

<https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en></comment></comment></comment>


Navigation Should Be Boring - <AUTHOR> https://allenpike.com/2019/navigation-should-be-boring <comment><USER3> Or, you could say "Don't make me think": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Make_Me_Think](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Make_Me_Think)

Unfortunately UX people seem to hate boring and/or simple stuff...

<comment><USER4> I think you're mistaking UX with UI design.

UX people tend to advocate for simple, boring stuff because they test. Like you pointed out, UX professionals like Krug, Nielsen, Norman constantly advocate for boring navigation:

"Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know."

\- Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience

However, someone simply designing UI will often suggest new and complicated designs, because they don't test. If they don't test, they are not practicing UX. Even if their job title is UX designer, they are just doing UI design.

Disclaimer: Yes I am defending my UX job, which involves testing and face time with users :)

<comment><USER5> This is precisely what drew me to start making Mac apps 10 years ago. There was a whole philosophy behind Mac OS X's Cocoa framework that contrasted sharply with my experience with all the programs I had been accustomed to using on Windows 95-98-2k-XP. In all those OSes, there was invariably some program I would need to run that had its own custom scroll bars that didn't work like normal, and the body of a scrollable page didn't respond to arrow keys and the scroll wheel, or the buttons had unusual semantics and required pressing them in certain ways. This was the norm for Windows programs. When I came to Mac and everything all worked the same, it was a breath of fresh air. The philosophy behind Apple's Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) at the time was that every app should follow the same basic rules with only slight variations where it made sense. I went full force into learning Cocoa because of this genius idea, but unfortunately now every app is Electron and each has their own UX paradigms that reinvent the wheel all over again. It's frustrating and I hope and plan to make apps that hearken back to the days of predictability, familiarity, and simplicity so people can just use their computers to get a thing done and then get off their computers ASAP, like it's meant to be.

<comment><USER6> Windows also had the equivalent to HIG, and it was just as rigorous as Apple's in many cases, especially by Vista. Take a look at this:

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/desktop/uxguide/gui...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/desktop/uxguide/guidelines)

Problem is, it was and is routinely ignored.

Anyway, as you say, it's the Electron era now, and it's the same everywhere. We had our golden age of desktop UX, but we couldn't keep it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Absolutely key ==> "Their "attention span budget" can thus be spent considering how your new thing can fit into their lives, rather than trying to recall ..."

UI is all about minimizing user workload, and NOT requiring people to learn redundant knowledge.

Take advantage of every bit of knowledge that they already have from previous systems.

Every split second they must use to figure out your new way to do someting they already knonw how to do another way, is squandered and redundant.

Eliminate it. Work hard to eliminate it, so that they can focus on your _real_ innovation

Note: even if you have actually figured out some truly better UI controls, they must be not merely noticeably better, but better by a margin that exceeds the cognitive costs of both the new learning & the ongoing disconnect from the main UI (and remember, they don't live in your app the way you do).

E.g., the fad towards 'clean interfaces' with minimalistic or totally hidden hotspots may look prettier, but is a huge waste of user time and generates animosity towards the product. Just the example of Gmail hiding the Trash folder; I don't know how many times I've had to help people telling them that they need to scroll down, click on the "MoreV" word (not even transiently highlighted as a control), then scroll down again... I use it so little I've even had to Google it myself in a rush... That and 1000 other things are not an improvement, they are a waste of people's time for some design conceit.

Of course, if you want to give off signals that your core product ideas aren't all that uniquely useful, and you need to create cute & costly UI differences as distractions, by all means, go right on ahead...

If you have a real innovation, the best thing you can do is put zero redundant learning between your user and your key innovations.

<comment><USER7> There may even be a good coding analogy way to think of this.

Consider that the user base already has a set of pre-installed libraries and callable routines for most UI functions. These were effectively created by MS and Apple by their design process, and installed in the user base by endless familiarization, then extended by Apple & Android on mobile devices. Those libraries are now well embedded and installed.

Make calls into those existing libraries.

Don't force the user to rewrite and reinstall new libraries (unless absolutely necessary).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd say that ideally navigation should be invisible. That is, natural, obvious, and requiring minimal cognitive load.

If this is not possible, "boring" navigation is the next best thing: it's tedious but obvious and predictable.

Highly creative navigation should be an exception, for art pieces of web design.

Please note that the presence of "boring" navigation does not prevent having "advanced" navigation, which is a faster equivalent for power users. E.g. many sites have efficient keyboard navigation. But that advanced navigation should complement, not replace the easy-to-discover "boring" navigation. A good example is Stackoverflow.

</comment><comment><USER9> I worked on an app for a few years (in the earlier part of this decade), and we redesigned the heck out of the app, moving from tabbar based design to hamburger menu. Literally everyone in the company were super happy about how the app looked.

When we did UX testing with real users, and also some users who were given the scenarios, it became painfully obvious about how much of a cognitive load it was, for the users to understand what's hidden behind the hamburger menu.

But we still continued with this design, because we (the organization as a while) didn't have the gumption to revert back to tabbar based design while HB menu was still the rage, and a year later Apple mentioned in one of the WWDC talks that Hamburger Menu is not cool.

Recently, I quit an app company because (in addition to other reasons) they decided to move from tab to hamburger (and I had an another offer).

</comment><comment><USER10> Some exceptions to the rule: Snapchat was made confusing on purpose[1], because its target demographics (teens) could adapt fast, but people used to more traditional UI schemes (their parents) had some friction using it.

In that, just like Facebook's "college email only" lock-out at start, it was a feature, not a bug.

[1][https://www.businessinsider.com/jeremy-liew-first- snapchat-i...](https://www.businessinsider.com/jeremy-liew-first-snapchat- investor-explains-why-the-app-is-confusing-to-use-2017-2)

</comment><comment><USER11> What alternatives are there to the ubiquitous "hamburger menu" for navigation that look good on both mobile and desktop?

Does anyone think that that static links are better than flyouts?

<comment><USER12> > What alternatives are there to the ubiquitous "hamburger menu" for > navigation that look good on both mobile and desktop?

Step one is to stop trying to make the same UI for mobile and desktop. You're guaranteed to end up with a result that is insultingly bad for at least one of those segments of your user base.

<comment><USER13> The issue is that you can always show more options on desktop. On mobile, you naturally have to choose fewer menu items to display. Where do you put the rest?

The worst is when the mobile version doesn't have those additional menu items at all, anywhere, and certain things are simply impossible to do on mobile.

Tossing the lower priority items onto an additional page (hamburger menu) when screen space is limited is often the fair and simple trade-off.

"Don't use hamburger menus" is often coupled with the hand-wavy "just create novel mobile UI that doesn't need it", but the reality is that the items in hamburger menus usually don't need their own top-level button on a small screen at all. That's why they're hidden behind a click. They aren't worth the clutter, but they're still things a user may want to do.

In my experience, seeing that just about everything uses the hamburger menu, like the Kindle, it's a concession users are willing to make in order to use a small device. What exactly is the trade-off here without downsides?

<comment><USER11> I would not characterize the "hamburger menu" as an "additional page". I would call that a "flyout". An additional page means that you navigate away - <USER2> you'd then be navigating to a sub-page that displays more links, if you did it that way.

<comment><USER13> Agreed, I phrased it that way because, for some reason, an additional page seems more agreeable to people in these discussions, yet a hamburger menu is really just a much more convenient take on that: a quick flyout that only covers part of the screen.

<comment><USER14> "hamburger menus are bad" vs. "no they're good" is such a silly argument to have - all you know about a UI that uses a "hamburger menu" is that there's an icon with three lines involved somewhere. You don't know what the application is for, what options are in the menu, or even the mechanics of the hamburger menu itself - for example on Windows the built-in "hamburger menu" control shows icons in compact state and can be expanded by default, which avoids most of the problems with options being buried, etc. It's frustrating that UI discussions tend to stay on such a superficial level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The article is right that users overwhelmingly tend to prefer familiar navigation design, but elides the question of how new patterns come to be familiar and accepted in the first place. If everyone followed its advice there would be no advancement or broadening of the commonly accepted navigation language or culture.

</comment><comment><USER15> I mean, I wish I could use a navigation bar on the bottom of my web app, but on ios touching that area springs back the browser chrome and on chrome pinning something at vh will place it out of the screen when the address bar is visible.

<comment><USER16> [https://medium.com/@eventbrite/mobile-safari- whyyyy-73cf6103...](https://medium.com/@eventbrite/mobile-safari- whyyyy-73cf61039047)

Here's a fix and description of the issue, but yes. The bottom of the screen will take trial and error. I've been messing around with fullscreen modals for interactive content, and iOS is the main problem, 100vh != 100% != position: absolute; bottom = 0; top = 0;

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can we all agree to stop putting the "back" button in the top left of the screen though? It's literally the _worst_ possible place to put a button that has a very high likelihood of being used.

<comment><USER18> I'm actually fine with a back gesture in this case. I think it's pretty commonly known that you can swipe back. And it's way more accessible than the top left back button.

<comment><USER19> > way more accessible

It can be too accessible, see got example the swipe left/right to change articles gestures Blogger had (has?). I could never scroll a long article to the end without accidentally navigating elsewhere.

<comment><USER18> I agree, those are awful. Edge swiping from the left is a lot harder to do by accident though.

<comment><USER17> Edge swiping from the left is nearly as cumbersome as reaching to the top left of the screen, for me. Not to mention the general finickiness of edge swiping (at least in my experience).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Time to Abolish "Statistical Significance"? - <AUTHOR> http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2019/03/time-to-abolish-statistical-significance.html <comment><USER2> I suspect if you take away tenure being based upon publication, you will find that many statistical measures become more honest. You can abolish statistical significance, but it won't stop the abuse of knowledge, which is the real problem here anyway.

<comment><USER3> Could you expand on what you mean by the 'abuse of knowledge'?

I agree that the focus on this metric negatively influences research outcomes, which extends to university structuring, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on how this extends to abuse of knowledge in general.

<comment><USER4> > Could you expand on what you mean by the 'abuse of knowledge'?

A nice way of saying "lying". Learning how to game the statistics (e.g. publish the 20th experiment that showed significance but fail to mention the other 19).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sometimes I wonder if the discussion about p < 0.05 has diverged a bit from practical considerations. In my field (population genetics and bioinformatics) for instance, I'm not sure any current journal would reject a paper where primary result has p=0.051 but accept an (almost) identical paper with p=0.049. Most papers seem to involve many separate analyses that together tell some story, and that story may even be an interesting negative result (where p >> 0.05). Whether or not statistical significance is a useful concept at all is a separate question, but I suspect the discussion of whether the threshold of 0.05 is useful might be out of touch with actual practice.

<comment><USER6> This is my experience in my slice of biology as well.

<comment><USER7> From the discussion on this I've read, I think a good direction would be to consider statistical tests like this as simply not "publishable" at all the way we currently think of it.

That is, if you have a theory about how a Gene relates to height on tomatoes, and you do a test, that test would show you you're likely on the wrong track if it falls below some p value, but the only thing it tells you by being above is that "there may be something here."

I think this is true for many fields with a replication crisis. The problem isn't statistical, the problem is no theory. If you have a functional theory there's all kinds of things you do to gain confidence in it, and mostly those will contribute to the ability to predict statistical results, but that is completely different on kind than sending out a survey and noting that question 2 and 6 are statistically correlated.

When a field thinks that the kind of early suggestive work like this is worth talking about, they should probably just talk about it in conferences and similar venues, rather than "publish" it where journalists will pick it up in a "science shows" story that 95% (lol) of the time turns out to be wrong.

In other words, I think it is fine that fields talk about early non-theory results -- that can be interesting for specialists to advance faster. "Publishing" this mostly-going-to-be-wrong stuff is leading to confusion among the public about what the scientific process demands and how trustworthy it is. That is not a good outcome in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One very important thing to know about the 0.05 threshold, and which I did not found in this thread, is that the ideal p-value for a problem is a function of the number of samples (and the effect size but it as a lesser impact).

0.05 is way to stringent if you have 10 samples and way too lenient if you have 1 million samples.

But, by force of convention, everyone is using 0.05 (a value suggested by Fischer when basically all datasets were small) independently of their sample size and in a world were we are sometimes reaching dataset size that would have been inconceivable when the threshold was suggested.

Here is a good article to start to think about how one would select a p-value for an experiment : [https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0032734)

<comment><USER9> It is not a function of only the number of samples. It is also a function of how costly are false positives (type I error) and false negatives (type II error). That is (from my understanding) the paper's main point.

But then you have to be able to calculate how costly is a type I and a type II error! That's seems a relatively straightforward question for a business (for example in A/B testing), but how do you measure that cost in academia?

I think this would only introduce confusion and another variable for p-hacking.

<comment><USER8> You can also use the apriori probability of a positiv, instead of a cost, which can be roughly deduced from existing litterature.

The strenght here is that you get rid of an arbitrary decision (p-value) and instead use quantities that can be measured and critiqued by a skeptical reviewer.

But, in my experience with small data, the impact of the size of the dataset dwarfed the impact of the cost/probability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> kalium-xyz Why is 0.05 so common to begin with. Its an arbitrary value ain't it?

<comment><USER10> Yep. But if you're going to make binary publishing decisions then you have to draw a line somewhere.

<comment><USER11> However "1/20 chance that, if the hypothesis is false, our research confirms it anyway" is not a good choice of somewhere for any important research that can affect people's lives.

<comment><USER12> This debate isn't that simple. The other side of this isn't that everything magically just gets more accurate. The cost will be withholding true discoveries from the medical community for longer.

Imagine you've done a study of something else and you accidentally discover a (properly FDR controlled) correlation between some drug and heart attacks, significant at 0.03 and with no big contrary prior.

Should you publish or wait 5 years for a follow-up study to complete?

What if three different groups stumble across this same finding? Should they all publish and maybe someone will realize 'shit this drug is killing people' or should they all wait to hit some other higher standard of significance?

The point is theres always a balance between specificity and sensitivity, a tradeoff in terms of costs.

I'd personally be happy with keeping 0.05 as the threshold for 'probably something here'. The real issue are about publication bias, incentives, naive interpretation of published work 'heres one study in Nature so it must be true'. I don't see any other purely statistical change, Bayesian (essentially has all the same problems, aside from taking into account priors) or whatever, that will solve these in any way that won't come without unacceptable sensitivity cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's an alternative:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.06605](https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.06605)

Victor Coscrato, Luís Gustavo Esteves, Rafael Izbicki, Rafael Bassi Stern — Interpretable hypothesis tests (2019)

Abstract:

Although hypothesis tests play a prominent role in Science, their interpretation can be challenging. Three issues are (i) the difficulty in making an assertive decision based on the output of an hypothesis test, (ii) the logical contradictions that occur in multiple hypothesis testing, and (iii) the possible lack of practical importance when rejecting a precise hypothesis. These issues can be addressed through the use of agnostic tests and pragmatic hypotheses.

Note that this enables acquiring one of the Holy Grail of Statistics, namely, controlling Type I & II errors simultaneously.

</comment><comment><USER14> In particle physics there is the concept of "look elsewhere" effect, precisely to take into account that if you look for a signal, for example of a particle of any mass in some range, there is the possibility that just by chance you find some statistical deviation at some mass value.

It is very different to confirm a prediction (i.e. to look for a particle with a precisely predicted mass), than to fish for some unexpected signal in your data.

In some cases Economics could do the same: Looking for an effect in any age range could be post-processed to take into account that you are looking into many age groups.

<comment><USER8> That's called the multiple comparaison problem in statistics and it is both well kown and compensated for in most studies (the hard part being not to have too mauch false negatives in an effort to keep the quantity of false positives constant) : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_comparisons_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_comparisons_problem)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Who is Timothy Taylor? (The 'about me' on his Blogger page is blank, and Googling doesn't turn up results that are obviously about him.) This refrain is so well worn by now that it seems that one really ought to have something fundamentally new to say, or be so much of a heavy weight that one's own opinion might be enough significantly to swing the pendulum, before hoping to have another repetition of it make any significant difference. (On the other hand, I guess it's just a blog post, so I shouldn't spend too much energy ranting about how someone uses his own blog.)

</comment><comment><USER16> P-values Broke Scientific Statistics—Can We Fix Them?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLM7xS6t4FE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLM7xS6t4FE)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is throwing the baby out with the bath water. Let's redefine it so it's useful again and reform academia. I'm running into more and more people who use headlines like this to ride bikes with no helmets.

</comment><comment><USER18> That was a lot of words.

There are two alternatives to the current methodology:

* Remove significance requirement for publishing

* Adopt another statistical measure like Bayesian stats

<comment><USER19> There are a few more listed in the article and elsewhere: * pre-registered experiments * listing number of regressing models * P-values with no significance declaration

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The model either converges or diverges

</comment><comment><USER21> Betteridge headlines law applies with p<0.001</comment>


Pink Noise - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise <comment><USER2> Excerpt:

"Pink noise or 1/f noise is a signal or process with a frequency spectrum such that the power spectral density (energy or power per frequency interval) is _inversely proportional_ to the frequency of the signal. Pink noise is one of the most common signals in biological systems.[1]"

Additional Excerpts From:

[https://www.dsprelated.com/showarticle/40.php](https://www.dsprelated.com/showarticle/40.php) An Interesting Fourier Transform - 1/f Noise

"Power law functions are common in science and engineering. A surprising property is that

 _the Fourier transform of a power law is also a power law_."

[...]

"Now we come to a feature that I find absolutely fascinating. In general, we have seen that a power law in one domain corresponds to a power law in the other domain. Further, there is an inverse relationship; if the time domain decays faster, then the frequency domain decays slower, and vice-versa."

[...]

"1/f noise has been observed in the strangest places- electronics, traffic density on freeways, the loudness of classical music, DNA coding, and many others."

[...]

"At least in a limited sense, 1/f noise is its own Fourier transform."

[...]

"However, no one knows what the phase of 1/f noise is, or even if it has a defined phase."

[...]

"Nevertheless, the idea that 1/f noise is its own Fourier transform is very compelling. Consider the Gaussian curve, the most important waveform associated with random events. The Central Limit Theorem tells us why the Gaussian is so commonly observed. However, it is also true that the Fourier transform of a Gaussian is a Gaussian. This seems more than coincidence– I think it is a critical clue in solving the mystery of 1/f noise."

===END EXCERPTS===

My Comment:

Some interesting ideas and relationships, are they not?

</comment><comment><USER3> I wanted to hear the difference between white noise, but while I can easily find an example of pink noise, searching for white noise just brings up a bunch of varieties of what's really "background noise". And good sources for comparison?

<comment> valiant-comma This sounds like a fairly good representation of true white noise:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KaOrSuWZeM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KaOrSuWZeM)</comment></comment>


Why a 24-Year-Old Chipmaker Is One of Tech's Hot Prospects - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/technology/nvidia-chipmaker.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0 <comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Why%20a%2024-Year- Old%20Chipma...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Why%20a%2024-Year- Old%20Chipmaker%20Is%20One%20of%20Tech's%20Hot%20Prospects&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

</comment><comment><USER3> Did they really write this article without mentioning cryptocurrency mining? o_O</comment>


OpenJDK now available for Windows - <AUTHOR> http://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/06/27/openjdk-now-available-for-windows/ <comment><USER2> Wow. This has been a long time coming, eh?</comment>


Month Two of TSF: 140,000 page views, $500 in revenue, and how I screwed up - <AUTHOR> http://thestartupfoundry.com/2011/04/04/month-two-of-tsf-140000-page-views-500-in-revenue-and-how-i-screwed-up/

<comment><USER2> I cant wait to tell people in about 2 years time when TSF is a household name that ''I was there when these guys only had like 160k pageviews a month and only $500 in revenue''

<comment><USER3> I don't get this mentality. I heard a lot of this sort of speak when The Social Network came out about how so-and-so was an early adopter as if they somehow made history. I could understand if you submitted your startup or tipped off TSF to help them grow, otherwise you're just another consumer, but with an overinflated ego. I'd like to coin this behavior "Backseat Entrepreneurism".

<comment><USER2> I read your comment 4 times but i still dont understand its relevance.Bragging about being an early adopter is one of those ''Guy Things'', think ''My gun is bigger then yours''

<comment><USER3> And yet you can't wait to tell people in two years that you were one of the first 140,000 eyeballs to TSF. It's the same idea is it not?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Glad to see that the pageviews didn't dip after launch.

Question: how did you initially get advertisers? I'm assuming that the $500 ($462 last month) is from your sponsors adhering to something like this:

      monthly fee = pageviews * $X.

Did they pay anything up front, or do you charge at the end of the month? Feel free to not answer if these questions are too prying. [I'm launching a small (side project) content site soon, so I am curious]

<comment><AUTHOR> Last month I used InfluAds (think along the lines of "The Deck") which paid on a CPM model.

This month I've switched to a flat rate for a 30 day run. I'm selling ads directly (AppSumo and MediaTemple), and through BuySellAds (no one has bought through this, but I think it's because I'm charging more).

If I know the sponsor well, I have no problem charging at the end of the month. If you have any more questions feel free to shout!

<comment><USER4> Very useful information. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Things I sucked at: > > 1\. Article output has dipped: Situations arose in > my life when I was unable to publish an article for the day. I should have > had several stories in my backpocket that I could fill in the holes.

Lesser people would deal with this by still writing articles that are complete crap. Better not to write the articles when you don't have the time and energy for them, so you could have handled it much worse. :)

</comment><comment><USER6> @g0atbutt - Speaking to bounce rate, the number 1 thing I see on TSF that discourages longer browsing is that, yes, you're absolutely meeting your ideal of 'more startup coverage', but I personally care less about the history of startups (day to day) than I do about NEW startups.

I'll typically hit TSF once per day, looking for something time-sensitive and, if I see it, reading that. If I don't, I'll bounce off. I usually visit the other articles on the weekend, which is where/when I read TSF the most.

What strikes me as odd though, is that 'coverage' is, I believe, a less time- intensive task than 'interviews', which is where you seem to be spending most of your time. While I value the in-depth articles, it would take less time to review new / launching / just-launched sites that I just happen to want to see more of.

Regardless, TSF is a staple that I recommened to all. I'm a little amazed to see that your revenues didn't increase more, month to month, but that speaks to the necessity of dogged persistence required of startup founders, I suppose.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on increasing coverage of new startups while maintaining the amount of interviews I do. I'm going to accomplishing this by streamlining the submission process for startups and getting most of the information I need right from that form. Thanks for your feedback. I always love hearing how people actually use the site!</comment></comment>


Supposed Samsung Galaxy S III image surfaces - <AUTHOR> http://www.bgr.com/2012/04/13/supposed-samsung-galaxy-s-iii-image-surfaces/ <comment><USER2> Wow .. why is this phone so highly anticipated ?! Frontpage of HN for a blurry, maybe-fake photo !

<comment><USER3> The icons don't even look like they line up straight.</comment></comment>


How Spotify's Discover Weekly cracked human curation at internet scale - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/30/9416579/spotify-discover-weekly-online-music-curation-interview <comment><USER2> I have been surprised by how useful the Discover Weekly playlists are. I can't say every single week/edition has been worth listening to, but a majority have. I actually started a new playlist folder last week just so that I can start saving entire Weekly playlists if they are worth listening to as a whole.

I think there are some valid weaknesses that the verge pointed out; perhaps most importantly that there isn't really a smooth flow to the playlist. I wouldn't say the transitions, or lack thereof, from song to song work. But on that end I tend to just shuffle the playlists anyways, which somewhat makes up for it.</comment>


MBassador still wins over Google Guava EventBus - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bennidi/eventbus-performance <comment><AUTHOR> New benchmark of the latest versions of both libraries available. Have a look at the plots and see how the performance of both libraries compare. Is MBassador the fastest event bus on the JVM?</comment>


Altacoin: Towards a More Efficient Centralized Cryptocurrency - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@yishan/whitepaper-altacoin-towards-a-more-efficient-centralized-cryptocurrency-99cfc710f3a0 <comment><USER2> [https://coinreport.net/canadian-altacoin- atc/](https://coinreport.net/canadian-altacoin-atc/)

already was a altacoin?</comment>