Ask HN: Do You Despise Marketing? - <AUTHOR> Ok maybe 'despise' is a strong word but i still feel there is something irreconcilable in a solo dev's SaaS and the promotion (s)he has to make to have a chance at earning some money from it.
You and I both scoff at pushy newsletters, influencers, affiliate links, even SEO - which by the way made majority of web unreliable.
Yet i know this is the only way to have a try at this attractive idea of working for yourself and introducing a tiny bit more freedom to your life (or is it?).
Then leave it to the pros you say? 9to5 looks just as unattractive. <comment><USER2> I think I despise marketing. For one marketers and spam calls have basically made me put my phone in airplane mode permantely, only allowing people in my contacts to get thru. I am getting close to the point of getting rid of my cell phone. If I get unsolicited emails I set up a rule to send them straight to the trash can. Mostly I am getting tired of every single interaction with a person or technology being used or designed to extract information or money. Don't get me wrong. I am willing to buy things. I just don't want to have to spend X amount of dollars for the rest of my life.

<comment><USER3> > I think I despise marketing

He posted on a site that's fundamentally a marketing campaign for a venture capital fund.

<comment><USER2> You know, I've never looked at it that way. But your probably right. Maybe I do like commercials after all.

At least it is unsolicited.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Done correctly, marketing is the act of giving value (usually in the form of information or opportunity) in order to capture value. It's reciprocal at the most basic level.

Unfortunately, too many folks have figured out that they can strip mine the audience by minimizing or ignoring the first half of that transaction.

I can't really despise marketing since I've spent 30 years in and out of it. But I can damn well despise bad, selfish marketing that doesn't even try to deliver any value.

<comment><USER5> Totally agree. If you've got something to say, and have some real value marketing is legit and darn helpful and a strategic need.

Of course without the preconditions marketing and sales sounds like a BS exercise of desperate come on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sure it would be nicer if good products were automatically successful on their merits alone. But the world is a very, very big place. Therefore a major part of the problem resting on your shoulders as a business owner is getting your product into the attention spheres of people who will pay for it.

IMO it's better not to fight realities you can't change. The best you can do — from both a business and a mental standpoint — is accept that marketing is a necessity and find a way to enjoy it.

I'm a programmer who's been indie for 10 years and I treat marketing as a series of open-ended experiments; this arouses my intellectual curiosity. I also gamify it by gathering real-time stats; this emulates the dopamine hit I get when a piece of code compiles.

I've vlogged and blogged a good bit about marketing from a programmer perspective, so if you'd like more on my take, check the links in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER7> I dislike that people think that landing pages and good copy == marketing. Those are tools that sometimes apply to good marketing, but marketing itself is just getting the right message to the right people. That can be honest communication, just saying that you have a product that solves a problem. It doesn't have to be a landing page... it doesn't even have to be online. Talking is marketing. Radio is marketing. Print is marketing. Conference booths, giving out business cards, sharing your story.

Even online, your web site / landing page are not your marketing... they are where your marketing sends people to convert them into leads to hand-off to sales.

If there is anything I do despise, it is the attitude of "If you build a landing page, they will come."

<comment><USER8> The thing is that you should indeed start with the landing page, as it makes it a lot easier to define your target audience, message, benefits, etc. Also, it isn't really worth bringing customers to a landing page that looks awful, as you might lose a lot of customers that you manage to bring at your door step just by showing a low quality website, even though your product might be good. I think it's about 50-50 the importance of on-page optimizations and off-page marketing. I also think it's about 70% product and 30% marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If we didn't have things like copy writing, influencers, and landing pages, we'd be worse off. I empathize that marketing can sometimes feel borderline manipulation but ultimately the market will test you and your product to see if it lives up to what's said/written.

if we didn't have marketing, we'd have a discoverability problem for which alternative solutions would probably have the same issues as marketing.

<comment><USER10> i mulled over this for a minute because i can't really find fault with your comment, but at the same time i look at the state of things and it seems far from ideal, or even acceptable.

my guess is there's a factor that affects the system you described: centralization. it's something i think about alot when i sort of try to look back and remember how i stayed on top of so much content back in the pre- web-2.0 times. i remember something like you describe - lotta reading copy, sure, and landing pages definitely, but the huge difference in my mind is how 'influencers' were more of a complex ecosystem of people who just sort of passed interesting links to other people. i dunno.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> No, because I believe you need it if you want your work/product/service seen and used by others. Relying on pure word of mouth doesn't work, especially not in the kind of timeframe needed for a company to stay solvent.

I also feel SEO gets an unfairly bad rap. Sure, it has been abused by dodgy sites, and those sites have indeed hurt Google's search results... but many strategies in white hat SEO basically boil down to 'write/create content people want and get it in front of them in logical ways'. A lot of times, good SEO and good usability/accessibility/design go hand in hand, since most of the things that help a site rank also tend to help the user as well.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am not sure I understand where you're coming from. Is your issue that it takes more than building a good product to get people to buy it? Do you wish you could build it and they would come? This is a fantasy that some people subscribe to, and that I have failed to hit repeatedly. In fact, I would say whenever I enter into building anything with this mindset, it's the biggest red flag of impending failure. There is a difference between being an engineer and being a product maker. You wouldn't expect a baker to be an amazing cook even though they both make food would you? If you want to be an engineer without the 9/5 and without the headache of marketing / sales, get a cofounder.

</comment><comment><USER13> I absolutely despise marketing, sales and advertisement. The reason is simple, they are in the business of making you feel bad with what you've got and try to sell you something to momentarily make you feel better. And let's not forget how much better the planet would be if we didn't buy garbage and took unnecessary vanity trips.

I believe the world would be a much better place without magazines, billboards, etc.

Regarding your SaS... you should definitely not engage in unnecessary conversion emails because developers also hate that.

<comment><USER14> The first two paragraphs sound as if you'd love "99 francs" (novel or movie, the movie captures the novel quite well IMO). It's about the topic of marketing and advertisement from the perpective of a creative producing advertisements (with lots of drama and sex for the story)

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the recommendation will definitely give it a try

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't to if this applies specifically to you, but I noticed that for a lot of people, the "hate" for marketing is a really a disguise for fear.

In practically every industry, marketers are slightly looked down at, and it's only when people face the need to do it themselves they realize just how hard the act of winning hearts and minds is.

Sure, there're a million and one cheap hacks, but the gulf between them and actually winning the love of an audience is huge. And we never one the cheap attention, right? We want the real thing: true appreciation of the value of whatever product or service you're building.

That's the only thing that wins loyalty, that's the thing Kevin Kelley was thinking about when he wrote "1000 True Fans".

So people want the fans, but to win them you have to get consistent at communicating value. And since many developers don't take pride in communication, and it's not a skill they've previously cultivated, it can easily feel just like you described, an exorbitant burden.

At some point in my life I realized that the one hard skill standing between me and working for myself long term is marketing. I made a conscious decision to desert any willful ignorance on my part and genuinely make and effort. I'm glad I did.

</comment><comment><USER16> I dont like advertising, if I am interested in something, thats upon me to research it.

I dont mind marketing per se, if Ive sought you out, so long as the information is truth and not fluffy lies. Dont track me or try to profile me without consent.

The point I think you're getting at is how to generate an income, my opinion is forget freemium/ads and ask people to pay. This is the only way out of the current privacy shitshow.

</comment><comment><USER17> I despised it because I sucked at it but as a SAAS founder, I realize that without good marketing, business will die. So I stopped hating it and am in a mission to take it head on which means learn, learn, learn.

Ok, no one wants pushy newsletters, influences and all that crap. But if done right, they also work to an extent. However, the most critical aspects of marketing are things like copywriting, landing pages (in SAAS world), good organic content that is researched and is specifically for your target audience (good SEO) etc.

If you are a founder, you cannot leave it all to pros especially early on. You need to learn some basics and go from there. I was on the hunt for that special digital marketing massiah for my company for a while when I finally realized that I need to learn more first before I go find that magical person.

</comment><comment><USER18> Yes. It's an annoying negative sum game we all have to play or spent enormous amounts of effort avoiding.

</comment><comment><USER19> So it's more a question of "Do you despise having to market yourself/your product"?

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't despise marketing in general, just marketing done for the sake of marketing. For example I hate blog posts that are create purely for SEO purposes.

Personally I just can't start marketing my product, even though I think it's one of the best in its space (analytics). The reason: I want to be sure it's the best, otherwise I would feel that I am just tricking people into buying an inferior product (which is what most marketing does nowdays, trick people into buying lower quality products for more money).

I think product should precede marketing. First make something great, then let people know about it. Build something truly better and only after that let the world know. Don't trick people into buying shitty products.

<comment><USER14> In general there is nothing wrong with marketing an interior product. It may be cheaper or more promising than the market leader but the customer is still able to decide for themselves. That said, it gets bad as soon as you market something your product doesn't offer (e.g. lie)

<comment><USER8> Well, just look at all the teleshopping ads. They do all the dramatization, with complex stories and inventing problems you don't actually have, and then comes the amazing product that efficiently solves this horrendous problem. They are not lying about what the product does, but they are lying about how it will actually affect your life. This also happens to most of the "self- improvement" books that promise you that you will get rich in 7 days, out of which the last 3 you can just spend to get a 6-pack. The idea is that a product "could" affect your life in a specific way, but it most likely won't in the way it's advertised.

<comment><USER14> I agree that advertisement should show why a product is good for the problem it solves and not why the problem should be solved.

My previous comment was meant as a motivation to you, to market your (presumably good) product, even if it is not the best in its problem domain, even if it is not the best and let the customer decide. And if you do so, never lie about the actual properties of your product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I despise bad marketing. I love and support good marketing. How to tell them apart? Good marketing is about providing value with postive intent. Bad marketing is just plain manipulation.

Hacker news itself (as a product) is an excellent example of marketing a tech product.

</comment><comment><USER5> I despise marketing and politics insofar as how it's done: lying, picking very narrow talking points without acknowledging the larger context and contradictions it comes with.

Marketing is what you do you don't have to hard sell: the customer comes in pretty convinced already. Sales esp. cold calling and hard selling is another matter and you do with no or bad marketing.

As usual anything that started good becomes severely distorted in the hands of the wrong people. Listen to a pitch from or discussion of marketing from Berkshire&H, AMD, Motorola, Broderbund sure. But listening to amway, a direct marketer, or Enron no thank you.

</comment><comment><USER10> Given the replies I think it would be wise to instead perhaps use a different term to distinguish it from the sort of area bill hicks was known to loathe. A term i used to see used back in the day was 'shameless self promotion'.

Personally, 'despise' is perfectly descriptive. Fortunately I've always done dev-related stuff as a tinkerer's hobby, unfortunately my discomfort at shameless self-promotion will likely mean I won't be quitting my day job anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER21> I despise deceptive marketing

<comment><USER8> Not only deceptive, but marketing that just promotes mediocre or bad products for premium prices.

Oh, and also, marketing for things/services you don't actually need, that just try to convince you that their thing is indispensible for your life.

</comment></comment><comment> heresie-dabord It is a category of false information. I block it.

</comment><comment><USER22> Not at all. I'm not very _good_ at it, but I really like the process of marketing. It's like a fun puzzle to figure out ways for people to find out about/buy the things I build.

</comment><comment><USER23> When you consider how much human and financial capital is put into it, yes. Doubly so when you add to that how much human and financial capital is put into dodging it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Yes. It creates over-consumption and wrong kind of optimization that is not around the product but the reach of the ad.

</comment><comment><USER25> Marketing has a light side and a dark side.

Light side: Closing the loop between what the customer thinks they want, what they need, when they need it. And what the company can provide. Being able to sooth over differences and work out conflicts. Done correctly everyone benefits.

Dark side: If you don't use our feminine hygiene spray your husband's going to leave you.

</comment><comment><USER26> I hate programming yet still program 9to5.

</comment><comment><USER27> I used to think of salespeople as slimeballs who would lie, cheat and steal to push something over on you. Any time anyone would try to sell me anything, I'd immediately become defensive and just get out of the conversation as quickly as possible.

Then I became an enterprise SaaS PM and started working on the other side of things with some really fantastic sales reps. I came to understand that, as with all jobs, there's a tremendous amount of variance in the quality of sales reps, and the good ones are actually really good. A great sales rep is an expert on her market and has a breadth of knowledge about the problems people face related to the product she's selling. She's not trying to push something you don't need; rather, she's trying to understand exactly what your problem is and help to resolve it. Obviously she's being compensated in the process, but a great sales rep selling a good product isn't going to waste time trying to foist that product on people who don't need it when she could spend her time much more productively.

A recent example of a time I really appreciated being sold to: I was looking for someone with conversion rate optimization expertise to redesign my ecommerce site, and I posted a job on Upwork. I got a lot of quotes and spoke to a few of the ones that sounded the best, and the third guy I spoke to really took the time to understand my goals, my company and my financial situation. Instead of trying to sell me a $5000 redesign of the site, he said for $350 he would review my analytics, ads and site itself and offer feedback on how to improve it from a CRO perspective. That was exactly what I wanted, but I just didn't know it was a thing. I didn't need to pay someone $5k to do a redesign - I just got a premium Shopify template and implemented it myself, and it looks great. I was really just looking for CRO advice, and because he had the domain expertise and took the time to understand my business, he was able to offer the right solution. That's what a great sales rep does.

Marketing is very much the same. A lot of it sucks because people take the shotgun approach of spamming everyone everywhere all the time and hoping a few people buy what they're selling. That doesn't mean marketing is bad, though. Once I was trying to figure out what to buy my girlfriend for Christmas, and an ad appeared on Facebook for a behind the scenes tour of the red panda exhibit at the SF Zoo. Unfortunately we broke up right before Christmas, so I ended up going with one of my buddies, but it would've been the perfect gift! That's what good marketing is - finding the right person at the right time and solving a problem.

So yeah, a lot of marketing sucks, but that doesn't mean you have to do sucky marketing. Instead of trying to play SEO games, you can just write really high quality content on relevant topics that will actually help people and make them see you as an expert. You can use influencers as a channel to reach the appropriate set of folks for your product, who will be happy to have it. There's lots of ways to market well, and I encourage you to figure out the ones that work for you before dismissing the whole concept.

Seriously, I do hope you figure it out. If you have a great product that will help people, it deserves to be marketed.

</comment><comment><USER28> I suggest we make it illegal. To remedy the problem a government website is created. Everyone who has anything for sale MUST list it there including prices and give everyone in the country, regardless who they are, the opportunity to buy it. If your potential customer doesn't know he needs your product it may be carefully described in a machine readable way, critically examined for a fee and listed as a suggestion for the prospects. If they desire it customers may create a detailed profile full of personal information (that will be guarded carefully) The suggestions are ordered by scale of promotion. If you successfully game the system and properly describe the exploit a large bounty will be be paid.

<comment><USER28> To pick the best product or service one would have to first know which exist. Further data can be gathered after this. Individually we might be happy to pick some random crap and pay to much for it. Collectively it has huge implications. You get an expensive world build out of useless crap. A market in private and personal data has even more terrifying implications. Genocide might not even be the worse. It can and probably will (for some it already is) become a slow torture device that excludes no one.

I politely thank you for silently disapproving of my opinion since I couldn't have made the point better myself.</comment></comment>


Multiplayer Game Networking: The Brute Force Approach - <AUTHOR> https://www.deconstructconf.com/2019/ayla-myers-multiplayer-game-networking-the-brute-force-approach <comment><AUTHOR> Really fun and enjoyable talk. It gives a good overview of why network latency makes realtime multiplayer games so hard.

One thing I wish it would have touched upon: some of these issues might be eased through the game design itself. I.e, you can design the game so that actions that require fast response are less likely to go out of sync with the server, and things that can only really be resolved after a full sync between all clients don't reveal a clear outcome until after a few hundred milliseconds.</comment>


Open Banking: Britain's gigantic financial experiment - adam-a https://news.sky.com/story/open-banking-britains-gigantic-financial-experiment-11204816 <comment> adam-a There's a good explanation of what this means on Wired [1]. Hopefully this means the end of financial planning apps asking for my online banking password. Interestingly they also suggest online payments might go directly through the bank rather than a payment provider like WorldPay, but I guess that depends on how varied the APIs are.

1: [http://www.wired.co.uk/article/open-banking-cma- psd2-explain...](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/open-banking-cma- psd2-explained)</comment>


How Braze Hires Product Managers - <AUTHOR> https://www.braze.com/perspectives/article/building-braze-hiring-product-managers <comment><USER2> Having used Braze's services, I would not recommend taking advice from this company. Their API is pitiful and only exposes a limited subset of the service's functionality, and they don't even use token-based authentication (it's a UUID API key)

</comment><comment><USER3> Honestly this process needs improving. It's quite fine as an overall principle: it wants to make sure the PM understands product, as well as has a sense of the trifecta of design, technology and business thinking. It's roughly based on the process Facebook has, which is nice. That's the basics of the job, and they're covered here.

That said, it also implies that the ownership of design is entirely on the design side, and engineering on the engineering side. That's fine from the a decision making and accountability perspective, because it does empower experts to make their decisions. But the description of the process here is that it's a silo. There is no expectation that the PM has coding skills, or design skills. There is no expectation of dialogue, only that they are a stakeholder that the teams will be happy to work with. Without empowering the PM (as well as the designers) to have a say on the engineering (and inversely), you're going to end up with decisions that are made in silos. You just get a local maximum from your teams.

Similarly, none of the questions seem to be about metrics. Can the PM figure out where users will come from? How they will convert? What's a good expectation? What are things to monitor? How would you translate those goals in a pitch for a feature? How would problems with metrics turn into items in the backlog?

The process as described paints the PM as a kind of super stakeholder, but doesn't actually empower them with any sort of business, design or engineering weight. It could be that those items are covered in the interview, but the fact that they're not articulated in the article does raise questions.

<comment><USER4> I would argue that a good PM doesn't need to be directly empowered, because by defining and communicating requirements clearly to stakeholder teams, the right path forward becomes self-evident. I do think you need domain knowledge to be able to fully figure out what your requirements are, how realistic certain paths are over others, but I disagree that you need to be directly empowered to overrule engineering or design decisions.

Example of a bad pm who needs to directly invoke their power to make decisions: "This portion of the page is loading too slowly. Cache the thumbnails and make the autoscaling for its microservice more sensitive to fluctuations. I'll talk to the design team and have them lower the resolution of the images."

Example of a good pm who does not need to directly invoke their power to make decisions: "Page loading speed is a pretty big concern for our customers and I don't think this part of the page is loading fast enough. What options do we have to make this load faster? What specifically is preventing it from loading quickly in its current state?"

PMs do not need to figure out the "how to do", they need to figure out the "what to do" weighted by importance and feasibility. The other stakeholders are the ones that figure out how. Or at least that's the way I think it should be. Also I really agree with what you said about data driven decision making

<comment><USER3> That's the prevalent opinion about PM, and I used to adhere to it. I don't think it works in practice. Design informs technology. Business informs design. All those things affect each other to make a good product. You can't do that if teams can't just say no to each other. It's important that they can. Having a say in things doesn't mean that teams need to fight each other and undermine decision making. It means they can convey what they think would be neat, and try to think outside the box to meet each other's needs.

Think about it in practice: you want to make a good camera. The engineers say they will approach things a certain way, the designers say they will produce a certain design, the PM says ok that sounds good, here is the roadmap and the strategy for this. You end up with a product that simply doesn't push the envelope, and has no cohesion. It's basically the equivalent of silos churning through their backlog. I think it's an underwhelming, underachieving view of product development, where no one grows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of these newly-hired Product Managers should take a couple minutes out of their no doubt busy day to look at what I can only assume is their main product, the web site:

\- the site took 23 seconds (!) to load

\- all content is hidden below the fold, with just some kind of animation visible. I assumed for a long time that the page was not loading. Nope - it's just not visible until (if) the reader scrolls down

\- after a couple of refreshes, the user is treated to a modal imploring them to sign up for a newsletter: "You love us. You really love us!" no I don't

\- there is also an email form at the bottom begging for subscriptions. There is a JS dismiss button that doesn't work

Actually, considering the above, I am not sure anyone should take Braze's advice about hiring product managers.

<comment><USER6> In most of companies the marketing website is run by the marketing team.

Also in most of those companies the marketing team doesn't talk with the product team, as a result the marketing content has nothing to do with the actual product

<comment><USER7> That's still not a company I'd been keen to work for. I'd rather work for a company where the Product Managers at least create the content for the website if not actually run it.

<comment><USER8> Eh, as a Product Manger I have more important things to worry about and you most likely are not the customer I would be targeting if I worked for a company like Braze.

Looks like they do direct sales which makes things like loading the website and "below the fold" significantly less important. Their focus is on lead generation so they can get sales folks talking directly to whoever the buyer persona at the company.

Source: I'm a PM at mid-size enterprise software company with 6 1/2 years experience.

<comment><USER9> Well, I don't know what other people do, but personally I do check the company's website before (preferably) or after the visit of a salesman from that company.

The way the site is made, if it feels like "just marketing hype", it does contribute (I agree with not-so-much-relevance) to the opinion I form on the company and/or the product (not unlike as it was the case once for the business card, from the way it is printed, the material, the titles given to the person before you, etc. you can derive some indicators).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice to get some articles on product management on HN.

Biggest issue I've seen in different companies with hiring pm is not really about choosing them but more about empowering and trusting them when they start working.

If you assess them on being a product manager, and then ask them to do project management stuff it is a lost of time

<comment><USER10> (Author here)

Regarding empowerment/trust: those factors are definitely critical to PMs' success, but I'd also argue that finding folks who can thrive with this independence is itself important. We've had success with defining clear areas of ownership within our product, within which PMs have substantial autonomy.

Regarding project management: I couldn't agree more. But at the same time project management does need to get done, and PMs are often well positioned to help. I generally feel that PMs should be accountable to making sure that effective project management is in place for the teams they work with, whether by partnering with designers/engineers to set up efficient processes or hiring/designating dedicated project managers (but not necessarily directly project managing themselves).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is all very reasonable, but I'd love to see more detail. I certainly agree a T-shaped profile is ideal for PMs, but I'd love to know in which of the listed skills a PM needs to show depth of expertise. Presumably product sense, but that's a pretty vague term that encompasses things like design and business strategy.

Similarly, the questions that each interviewer is being asked to dig into are good, but many of them are fairly self-evident. Of course the design team wants to ensure the PM can work well with designers, but what I love to learn from other companies is how they assess that. Some teams do homework, others do design exercises during the interview and others have the candidate talk through what's well- and poorly-designed about an app they use.

I'd definitely be interested in a follow up that gets further into how interviewers assess the relevant questions.

I'll throw in a mildly shameless (but relevant) plug for a book I just finished about interviewing for PM jobs: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TCRCG69](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TCRCG69). It's focused on how a candidate can succeed, but it goes through the interview process and some detailed questions that I have seen as a candidate and asked as an interviewer.

</comment><comment><USER4> Cached link while website is down: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vXVH6J...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vXVH6J9rUWoJ:https://www.braze.com/perspectives/article/building- braze-hiring-product-managers+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER12> interesting. but I found it odd to have no sort of evaluation regarding to decision-making based on metrics / data. this is something I would strongly recommend

<comment><USER10> (Author here)

Agreed on your point. I didn't go into a ton of depth about the details of the interview, but fwiw this is always addressed in depth during the course of the product case, and touched upon during phone screens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I couldn't figure out what they actually do, but it apparently involves AI, so take my money, please.

<comment><USER14> They're an enterprise multi-channel marketing company (e-mail, SMS). They're one of the biggest in the industry. Formerly known as AppBoy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Website down for maintenance?

<comment><USER16> Or down for HN Load

<comment><USER17> This.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I see run-of-the-mill Product Manager jobs getting 100+ applications on LinkedIn. Is this mostly garbage (autoapplies from India etc.) or is competition really that fierce?

<comment><USER3> Both. The problem with PM jobs is that there's a lot of variance in quality, as well as difference between the responsibilities across companies. Furthermore, since a lot of the job is often just management, it's hard to filters for people who know to say the right things (Eg regurgitate a book or article) and those who'd do the right thing in dev.</comment></comment>


Tampon now lets you buffer tweets with pictures - <AUTHOR> http://tamponapp.com/

<comment><USER2> This really is a terrible name. And putting "tampon means buffer in French" at the bottom while having a logo that looks like a tampon with a string isn't fooling anyone. I like the app idea, but am not going to use something called Tampon.

<comment><USER3> In his defense, it looks like julien_c is actually French... but the logo is what got me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm sorry, but this is just outrageously sexist. And then people complain and argue that the industry isn't outright biased against women.

The developer needs to grow up and come to his senses. And notice how I'm certain it's a guy.

<comment><USER5> I also think it's a really bad name but I didn't go as far as label it as _sexist_.

Do you mind sharing the basis behind your affirmation?

<comment><USER4> Feminine hygiene is a touchy subject. It's not something you just casually bandy about, and it's a major turn-off admittedly for both guys and girls. But to be in an industry where it's OK to go ahead and make an app and call it Tampon and not get called out for it (I'm glad people here on HN have, thank you guys) means that we are in a crass industry where people have no regard for touchy subjects that could make our female compatriots uncomfortable.

(Some) women go to great lengths to hide their monthly discharge and related hygiene control. Imagine how they would feel if they tried to use this app on a daily basis?

There isn't a good comparison for the guys, but the real grind is that it's a bad name for an app that has nothing to do with its purpose. Imagine if it were called, I dunno, Condom. Why the fuck would you call it that, even if _condom_ where West Gibberish for "buffer?" It's not funny, it's just uncouth and inconsiderate.

For the record, I'm a guy.

<comment><USER6> I know a few women who were repulsed by the name of the Ford Probe. It's not just hygiene but any connotation of a very intimate device or action.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why in the world is this named after a feminine hygiene product?

</comment><comment><USER8> There is no way I would ever use this project at work or even for home projects because at some point, someone somewhere will have to read its name, or hear it in a conversation. Which will be some combination of embarrassing or insulting for everyone involved.

This is the biggest naming fail I have ever seen in the industry.

</comment><comment><USER9> "Tampon"? Seriously? Let the app shine without stopping people short because of the name.

<comment><USER10> Hey if iPad overcame its name, this could work too!

<comment><USER11> Pad, in English, has common uses other than a feminine hygiene product - a pad of paper, a building pad, a launch pad. Tampon doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ok -- next on my to-do list is a new name.

<comment><USER12> Call it Baffa (Japanese translation of Buffer)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea, but this sounds a bit too close to Buffer :)

<comment><USER12> I think anything other than tampon would be fine. Since it's open source, might as well call it "tweet_scheduler".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was skeptic whether this is a real project, or it is just a parody/trolling site/project.

</comment><comment><USER14> How about "Sponge" for a name? Same idea as your current name, but less...upsetting. Could go a few ways too: bitsponge, sponge.it (a verb!), etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion! Much more useful than complaining about the current name IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Thought I had gone back in time for a sec...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4484526>

</comment><comment><USER16> I initially thought it was an app for female hygiene!

</comment><comment><USER17> Why advertise the trendy technologies (-PHP) it's built on?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because it's an open source project: <https://github.com/julien-c/Tampon></comment></comment>


Infra-red Invisibility Cloak helps vehicles blend into environment - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14788009

<comment><USER2> Tanks have big engines. Some have gas turbine engines. How is the heat from those dissipated to be invisible on an infra red scope from 400 meters?

</comment><comment><USER3> This would be great for border crossings.</comment>


Tesla's Model 3 Is Now America's Best-Selling Electric Car - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-03/tesla-s-model-3-is-the-best-selling-electric-car-in-the-u-s <comment><USER2> Isnt there only the chevy bolt? does that count?</comment>


An Interview with Paul Lutus(2012) - <AUTHOR> https://hanselminutes.com/342/an-interview-with-paul-lutus <comment><AUTHOR> What a fascinating story. I specially enjoyed how he decided to start writing the program that would eventually be called Apple Writer. When people like him or Linus Torvalds decide to write a cool program, they literally change history.</comment>


Things to know about sleep as the clocks go back - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/health-41666563 <comment><USER2> Aside, whatever political party calls for ending the time changes and switching to permanent DST gets my vote. My kids are positively _feral_ for the week after a time change.

<comment><USER3> "permanent DST"

Which would mean it would be dark when school starts. It's hard enough to get them out the door on time as is. I fully support getting rid of the time change, but not by making DST permanent.

<comment><USER4> I don't know about kids, but I'd prefer to enjoy the precious few moments of sunlight after work, rather than catch a glimpse of it on the way to work and then waste away the sunlight hours in an office.

Also, wake up lights.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. Sunlight before school is only glimpsed through windows, which is not worth sacrificing the opportunity to spend time outside in the evening.

<comment><USER6> A lot of people are borderline incapable of waking up in the dark and functioning normally throughout the day. There are a lot of physiological triggers sunlight exposure in the morning does to naturally wake most people up, and deviating from those can be quite unhealthy.

<comment><USER5> Artificial lighting, white not yellow, and lots of it, can help with that.

Anecdotally, when I moved my clothes into the guest room and got ready for the day with all the lights on instead of getting dressed by nightlight, I was much more wakeful. Also made fewer errors with navy/black socks :)

<comment><USER7> In Australia, Philips sell an LED bulb call SceneSwitch[1] (formerly Choose Scenes), which alternate between cool and warm white when switched off and back on. I've installed in all but the bedrooms.

1\. [https://www.philips.com.au/c-m-li/choose-a- bulb/sceneswitch](https://www.philips.com.au/c-m-li/choose-a-bulb/sceneswitch)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For many years (decades even) starting during childhood or adolescence, I used to wake up exactly 4 hours after falling asleep. One moment I was sleeping soundly, the moment right after I was wide awake. It was so precise that I used to look at the clock, subtract 4 hours, and know exactly the time I managed to fall asleep the night before.

It was not stressful at all. I would get up, go to the bathroom, drink some water. Maybe read a book, a manga, study an algorithm, or write something. It was a very peaceful time of the day—rather, the night—to do something with a clear mind; no noise or other people around. I was not sleepy nor groggy and I could choose when to go to sleep again. But I knew I should not drag that time forever, because I still needed to get around 4 hours of sleep before finally getting up in the morning, or I would have a miserable day.

I never thought much about it, until reading about 'biphasal' sleep and how people of times past used to sleep like that.

These days my sleep is more troubled than in my teens and twenties and I have a tighter sleep schedule—probably because I've always been a night owl and I don't have anybody nagging me about going to bed early, so I don't. Somewhere along the way, I lost the habit of biphasal sleep.

I cannot say whether it's correlation or causation (let alone which way), but I used to sleep much better during my biphasal sleep years.

PS. articles like this describe me to a T, dunno if it has anything to do with it: [https://lonerwolf.com/9-signs-youre-an-old- soul/](https://lonerwolf.com/9-signs-youre-an-old-soul/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Hmm, had no idea long sleep is also linked to developing more diseases. Also makes one wonder in what way the causal effect (if any?) works, i.e. do those people tend to sleep more because of the diseases or is it the other way around?

<comment><USER10> I can give one concrete example of where it definitely is causal.

There was a short BBC documentary series about sleep a few years ago, and one of the episodes focused on a man who slept for ten hours a day and still felt drowsy and without energy. After going through a sleep clinic with all kinds of tests, the conclusion was that _he should try to sleep only six hours_.

The basic issue was that because he spent ten hours a day in bed, trying to catch up on what he _thought_ was a lack of sleeping causing his tiredness, his body never got tired enough to enter deep sleep. Because he missed his deep sleep cycles, his sleep did not recover his energy properly. So this was a vicious cycle.

After a few weeks of forcing himself to wake up after six hours of sleep his problems were basically solved.

So the thing to remember is that duration of sleep tells you nothing about the _quality_ of sleep.

EDIT: While we're here, I've had a lot of sleeping problems in the past, so here some other tips that I remember from this series, and from my sister who studied chronobiology (the science of internal clocks in biological systems, including sleep cycles):

\- Note emphasized enough by this article: the deep sleep cycle is necessary for cleaning your brain from neurodegenerating toxins[0]. Getting that stage three deep sleep is essential for your mental health!

\- Don't use alcohol to induce sleepiness: yes, it makes you fall asleep faster, but it also prevents you from the deep sleep. You end up not being refreshed afterwards.

\- Train your brain to associate your bed with sleeping. If you can't sleep, leave the bed, do something that's not so stimulating that it keeps you awake like reading a book (avoid that mobile phone at all cost) until you feel sleepy enough to go back. This article singles out teenagers here, which is ridiculous: adults are just as guilty of doing this to themselves.

\- Because of the previous point, make sure you don't use your laptop/phone in bed, nor have a TV in the bedroom.

\- The reason warm baths can help with falling sleep: a fast drop from a high core temperature to a low temperature triggers drowsiness. So what the bath does is heath you up until you are warm. If you then leave that bath and enter a cold bed that needs to be warmed up this triggers a sleep response. Hot milk probably gives a similar trigger, but I'm sure about that one.

\- Fasting can help with jet lag. Specifically: don't eat for at least sixteen hours (drinking water is fine), then eat your first meal at breakfast (tangent: "break fast"). This resets the body clock.

[0] [https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/brain-may- flus...](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/brain-may-flush-out- toxins-during-sleep)

<comment><USER11> This, so much. I went through a very similar experience - having tried spending longer and longer in bed in frustration at my insomnia, I did a course[1] that measured how much of that time I was actually asleep, then _restricted_ my time in bed to that amount and no more. Having trained my body to sleep when in bed, I could then extend it slightly week by week, until I found the optimum I need (7.5 hours).

[1]: [https://www.sleepio.com/](https://www.sleepio.com/)

<comment><USER12> This is why it's common advice that if you cannot sleep, get out of bed. Go clean the house or do some light exercise until you feel tired, and then try again.

I can usually fall asleep fine, but will often wake up early and can't get back to sleep. If it's anytime after 5am, I just get up and start my day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd be interested in seeing a study about how having many timezones in a region affects sleep. For example in the US there are activities that are geared towards the west coast that keeps the east coast up later. Some that come to mind are sports. Between NFL games, UFC events and esports matches I have stayed up many nights for two or three hours later than someone on the west coast would have to for the same purposes.

<comment><USER14> Why couldn't you just watch it the next day? I haven't watch "live TV" in years, get all my content from the internet, it actually feels weird that in 2017people still let events and TV programs dictate their schedules.

<comment><USER15> If you have the discipline not to peek at the scores... My neighbour watches soccer from his home country at odd hours of the night, going to work a couple of hours later. Says he'd otherwise only watch a replay knowing his team had won and then it takes away the suspense. His wife makes him sleep in the guest room!

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure of the details but there was something recently saying knowing the ending, I think it was focused on movies, actually leads to greater enjoyment (or possibly excitement). It was surprising to me, I go a long way to avoid spoilers -- I'd imagine the same would happen with sports matches.

I don't generally watch sport, nor follow a team, but when I do it's good sport whether I know the result or not.

<comment><USER15> Some people like to know there's 'twist' ending and the thrill is figuring out who did it. I avoided spoilers for Blade Runner 2049; Harrison Ford was in it and if you've seen the first movie that's all you need know!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One tiny but helpful trick i got by reading about sleep is the ~2h cycle.

I know if I wake up and I can't fall asleep right away, I'll just have to do something for 90minutes and it will come again. It's stress free.

</comment><comment><USER18> Gosh I wish I could sleep like I used to when I was a teenager. I constantly wake up throughout the night. Can't sleep in if I wanted to. Probably get 6 hours of sleep a night if you subtract wakeful interruptions.

Not sure why. I'm not overweight at all, 10% body fat. Exercise every day for at least half an hour, usually more, running, weightlifting, sports. Work isn't stressful. I don't get it.

<comment><USER19> Small noises will wake me up instantly, I have to have a fan or white noise filling the room to sleep soundly. Also if you haven't already try to make your room pitch black, tape any leds on electronics and get blackout curtains.

<comment><USER18> Hmm, I wonder if small noises is it. The upstairs neighbors had a kid a few years back. He's loud. During the day, though. I don't often find myself waking up to the kid's noise -- I just find myself waking up. Maybe I'm waking up to the kid and just don't realize it. Hmm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > 2\. What happens in your body when you don't sleep enough?

You happen to create blurry charts ;-)

</comment><comment><USER10> That morning/evening chart at the end is kind of worthless in how vague it is. I mean, it's very low-resolution approximation of a normal distribution, without telling me anything about what it means to be a morning or evening person, or what distinguishes "moderate" from "extreme".

</comment><comment><USER21> I was reading this yesterday [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt- sh/its_four_in_the_m...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt- sh/its_four_in_the_morning) about people who wake up at 4am

The yoga teacher baffled me the most, only taking 4 hours or so of sleep a night. I really can't imagine that working for me, 7.5 - 8 hours just seems to hit the sweet spot.

<comment><USER22> The brain needs sleep more than the body. If you're using your brain more than the yoga teacher then it makes sense you need more sleep. Of course, different people are wired differently but as a rule of thumb it appplies.

Slightly off topic (i.e., it's about the brain and not sleep) but the book "Your Brain at Work" by David Rock is a personal fave.

<comment><USER23> > If you're using your brain more than the yoga teacher then it makes sense > you need more sleep.

How could you possibly measure these values?

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure how you'd measure it for this example. But I can tell you "Your Brain at Work" explains how and why thinking (as abstract as that sounds here) is a finite resource.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I stopped setting an alarm most times of the week and sleep for 10h every day (2-12).

After over a month I noticed that I would wake up earlier. I wake up after 7-9 hours and feel rather refreshed. Most of the time I still sleep 10h because I staying in bed so much.

<comment><USER6> Very similar. If I try to force a sleep schedule I'm just miserable. If I drop alarms I sleep for 10 hours for a while before getting a natural 8 hour sleep cycle back.

That being said, I loathe those days I sleep 10 hours. Hell, I'm super jealous of people that can function on 6 hours. Every hour spent sleeping is an hour of life I miss out on. I really hope in our lifetimes we can engineer something to dramatically reduce the need for sleep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like that I'm reading this while coming off night shift (medical resident). I wholeheartedly agree that sleep is essential to life and healthiness.

<comment><USER26> I like that people making life and death decisions for others are sleep deprived.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've found the free Sleep Cycle[0] app to be very useful visualizing my sleep patterns, plus it lets you set a 30' window (free version; perhaps other options in the paid version) for waking at a near-waking point naturally.

[0] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.northcube....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.northcube.sleepcycle&hl=en)

or

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sleep-cycle-alarm- clock/id32...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sleep-cycle-alarm- clock/id320606217?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER28> To avoid confusion for anyone in the US reading the linked article, the parts of the US that observe Daylight saving time will change in a week (November 5), not tomorrow (October 29).

</comment><comment><USER29> China lacks DST, and I swear the sun is out at 4AM in the summer. I guess the problem is that the time zone is already biased so that the sun is out at 6:30ish even in the winter, it just rises earlier in the summer. And that's just for Beijing of course, the whole country is under one giant time zone.

<comment><USER30> China's timezone is calibrated for Shanghai. The western border is about two hours off of solar time ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#/media/File:Solar_ti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#/media/File:Solar_time_vs_standard_time.png) ). Compare China's +8:30 which border's India's +5:30.

<comment><USER29> Urumqi is about 1.5 hours off, and stores/schools have localized schedules to compensate. I guess Kashgar is even more worse off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Last chart: UK and Spain have a 1 hour time zone difference, but apparently only 15 minutes difference in bed time. (On approximately same longitude)

<comment><USER32> It also neglects to mention the entirely different lifestyle in Spain, different attitude towards work, not to mention the siesta, which one would think worth noting in a sleep related article :)

<comment><USER33> Siestas are pretty much only taken by old people and kids, even in Spain. Multiple polls have shown the average working-age adult never or rarely takes one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Damn PagerDuty

<comment><USER35> and newborns

<comment><USER36> And 4 year olds...

<comment><USER37> You're not kidding. Way back when, my younger sister went through a phase of waking me up at 4am to play right around that age. Saw some of my first sunrises out of it, but I'm glad it stopped happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Ha! Clocks have no influence over my sleep if I don't change my schedule with the clock!

</comment><comment><USER39> There's nothing more depressive to me then waking up in the morning and it's both cold and pitch dark outside. So, unlike so many people in this thread, I happen to like the DST.</comment>


Ask HN: CakePHP? CodeIgniter? Symfony? Other? - <AUTHOR>

I'm interested in what the HN community has to say about these PHP frameworks?
What makes them different from each other?
What makes each better/worse and why?
All things considered, what is your favorite? <comment><USER2> Kohana is my favorite PHP framework by a long shot. The developers are very bright and they work hard to incorporate the wants and needs of the community, without diluting quality. It is PHP5 only, though.

Use CodeIgniter if you need PHP4. The two are similarly flexible and light.

<comment><USER3> ++ for KohanaPHP. It's one of the most elegant and powerful PHP5 frameworks you will find out there. The devs are great!

Positives: * cascading filesystem with built-in support for modules * very clean and easy to use ORM implementation * auto loading of classes * easy to understand syntax * HMVC support is currently in development * open communication between community and devs * flexibility ... you can pretty much do whatever you want with custom class libraries, vendors without much hassle.

Negatives: * still a relatively new framework that is changing fast, but the current trunk branch is now stable. * expanded documentation module is in development

<comment><AUTHOR> I had a look at Kohana after your posts, and I really like the look of it, especially since I was leaning toward CI however didn't want to learn in an environment which was supporting a mix of PHP4 and 5. If I'm learning PHP now, I may as well learn PHP5 and work in an environment which can fully facilitate that without having to bloat up and lose flexibility by supporting 4 as well.

Kohana really does look like a great framework, however after reading the forums and wiki a little I'm worried that if I begin learning now, I'll need to change a lot of what I learn in the coming months with the 2.3/3.0 branch (whatever they end up calling it) - and whatever I start building will have to change too.

This isn't a huge problem as whatever I build now will be mainly side-projects which are designed to push my learning forward (such as small e-commerce sites, rating sites, file uploader sites), however considering the changes coming soon (API etc) it's a little frustrating.

However, thanks to you two I've found Kohana which is absolutely what I was looking for. Cake is a little too bloated and complex, CI is more flexible and simple, however to appeal to a larger userbase must support also PHP4 and 5, while Kohana is very niche insofar that is all about 5 and thus very much less restricted.

I'd be interested to see what other people who have worked around these frameworks think of Kohana.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have only tried CodeIgniter so I can only speak for that but it is by far the best decision I have made to move to this MVC framework. It's holds a lot of libraries and helpers which will simplify most tasks and they are incredibly easy to extend. It's downside though is that you're not able to call functions internally from other controllers but once you get used to that it doesn't pose many problems. I would recommend you having a look at their documentation (which is very well done) and a demo video.

</comment><comment><USER5> codeigniter is a good purely MVC framework that doesn't add much extra overhead to your project (by default -- you can pull in plenty of overhead with the external libraries and such). if you want the MVC separation but don't want to be weighted down by other things and like to hack around in php, its a good choice.

cake/symfony/etc. are rapid development frameworks that try and recreate some of the magic of rails in php form. they're very good to get somewhere quick. they do suffer from a bit of feature bloat and performance problems if you're planning for a large application down the line.

i've used them all, i like them all. having said that, i would hands-down go with codeigniter on every project _IF_ they were to pull together a better community and form better community code and libraries. for example, it took me forever to get a simple, working, secure authorization library in codeigniter, including having to mess around with the module myself to do what i wanted it to do. it comes fully functional in cakephp.

just my $0.02

<comment><USER2> _i would hands-down go with codeigniter on every project IF they were to pull together a better community and form better community code and libraries_

The CI community is one of my favorites. People are quick to respond on the forums, and Ellis Lab works closely with the community to make sure people get the help they need. As for code, I feel that there are plenty of good solutions for most of the common spots that CI itself does not fill, but everybody's needs are different.

<comment><USER5> i definitely agree that the community response is there, but the community organization and resources are not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> CodeIgniter is OK, but the first question is -- do you really need any PHP framework? It's not hard to get MVC in a few lines of code without any framework.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, but as I posted above. Its a good idea to look at the other frameworks and learn from them.

But I do agree, it is better to right one for yourself and it is not that hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anything but Symfony.

</comment><comment><USER9> phreeze is my pick when django isnt an option</comment>


Machine Made of Lego Builds Anything You Want — Out of Lego - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/10/legobot/?pid=653 <comment><USER2> Also here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1806815>

and here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1804098>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, I posted the last article in your list. The reason I posted this was because I enjoyed reading the thoughts/remarks of the guy who made it, I thought HN would, too.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: HN completely empty - <AUTHOR>

Not sure what happened, but logged in, I can't see any post, setting, etc. on HN. I can only submit... I know HN takes the rule of hellbanning for blocked users, but:
(1) I don't believe I did anything to deserve hellbanning/blocked (at least I hope not)
(2) Hellbanning means I shouldn't see a difference. But the difference between a normal HN page and one with just the orange toolbar is glaring
I've already emailed info@yc but was just wondering if anyone else has experienced this issue.
ps. this issue is non-existent when I'm not logged in or on a different account. <comment><USER2> I can see this post, so presumably you aren't hellbanned. There is probably some sort of bug...

</comment><comment><USER3> You dont have a [dead] so you are not.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> everything is back to normal now :)</comment>


Remembering Elizabeth Wurtzel, a Proudly Difficult Person - <AUTHOR> https://www.thecut.com/2020/01/obituary-writer-elizabeth-wurtzel.html#_ga=2.118839755.319417448.1578604501-260754380.1520022068 <comment><USER2> One of those people I look at and think, "I wish I had the balls, I could get so much done."

And I finally have an entry for the female column of my "List of Brilliant Assholes Whose Assholery People Forgive Because They're Brilliant." Maybe we _are_ making progress.

</comment><comment><USER3> I genuinely don't understand why we glorify people who act like this - regardless of their gender, sexual orientation or race.

People like this harm others in their blind pursuit of what is later described as "genius" \- and yet plenty of people attain similar success without harming or wronging others in the process just sustaining an ego they associate with success outcomes.

<comment><USER4> In a world seeking a path to justice we'd see men's propensity for violence trend towards the level of women's, rather than women's trajectory rising toward that of men. The latter is not the equality justice should seek.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> David Foster Wallace's harrowing story "The Depressed Person" is supposedly based on Wurzel. (I learned this from a HN comment! [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12746364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12746364))

</comment><comment><USER6> > She cycled, proudly, through jobs and agents and editors and publishers. She > could treat people badly. She'd blow deadlines and be rude and endlessly > dramatic. _More compassionate friends chalked it up, most of the time, to > mental illness and drug addiction or understood it to be the collateral > damage of her life force._

Please don't be this person.</comment>


How Bitcoin Could Become a Viable Currency - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/the-exchange/bitcoin-could-become-viable-currency-163337407.html <comment><USER4> Here's my proposal: let's forget exchange rates. Let's not confuse them with _inflation_ [0]. That's a red herring. Exchange rates are important for BTC's legal users _now_ because there's not (yet) production in BitCoin's economy. Apart from drugs[1], BTC is pure store of value, and it should be analyzed as such.

This is important for this discussion, because exchange rates ultimately won't matter that much. By "ultimately", I mean that phase of development when (if) BitCoin becomes a full currency, that is, when there's somebody, some corporation, operating and trading significantly in the currency. _I won 't lend the status of currency to any commodity which is not used this way_.

And what's clear is that both BitCoin and gold are shit currencies. Even conceding the exchange rate could stabilize enough for a modern day Rockefeller[2] to pull it to a success, you still would have to contend with the deflation inherent in this "currency".

There's a reason why gold is traded in _commodities_ markets -- and not as a currency. There's a reason why banks and states trade and store USD, instead of gold. You simply can't grow an economy like it's the 20th century with gold, or BitCoin. In fact, BitCoin is even more ruthless than gold. 19th century economies could at least pray for the discovery of a gold vein, to alleviate their deflationary comedowns. BitCoin denies even this possibility with the cold, germanic efficiency of a mathematical proof.

[0] The exchange rate we run against our future selves, if you will.

[1] Which doesn't count anyhow, since you would agree there's a risk markup on them for their illegal status, which makes dubious extrapolating any analysis from them.

[2] An improbably apt group of entrepreneurs, who even more improbably would decide to bet their future fortunes on a currency designed by _computer_ geeks with a penchant for goldbuggering.

<comment><USER5> The fact that Bitcoin is deflationary is purely a product of the software/protocol. Given consensus to change it, one could make it inflationary easily. E.g. by having blocks always pay out 25 btc as a reward or even have successive blocks pay out increasing rewards.

<comment><USER6> It would still be inferior to modern fiat currency from a macro-economic perspective, because whatever your rule is going to be, it will not adapt to the development of the economy.

Think of it this way: The abundance of money should somehow correlate with the abundance of real resources. When this correlation breaks down, bad things happen to the economy.

In modern fiat currencies, the supply adapts _automatically, without government intervention_ to the development of the economy, via the mechanism of bank loans. When a bank makes a loan, the money supply grows. When a loan is paid back, the money supply shrinks.

Bitcoin cannot work that way by design, which makes it a bad choice for a common-use currency - at least from the perspective of macro-economic behavior.

<comment><USER7> I hadn't thought of that before. So bitcoin is like gold in this regard, when gold was used as currency.

It occurred to me that bank notes today are the ancestors of a receipt that promised you a certain quantity of gold. Cash is just a promise - <USER2> abstraction from the underlying thing of value.

Whilst bitcoins are limited, you can create as many promises as you like - <USER3> just need an extra layer on top of bitcoin. Does this solve the loaning problem?

You would still have bitcoin as the base, like the gold standard but with none of the physical limitations of actual gold and with people still being able to easily transact in bitcoins.

I'm not sure whether having two things that you can pay with - bitcoin / promise of bitcoin - would be implementable. Would it require another crypto layer on top of bitcoin, with some parallel blockchain?

Gold standard: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard)

This is an interesting read about bank notes: [http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/pages/about/history...](http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/pages/about/history.aspx)

<comment><USER6> I think it's possible that introducing reserve banking on top of Bitcoin could solve the lending problem for a while, just like it solved the lending problem on top of gold - for a while.

In the end, though, the same problems would crop up again after a while: bank runs, the attempt to deal with bank runs via a central bank, the tendency for downward spirals in countries with a trade deficit, and so on. Eventually, countries would have the same incentives to get out of a "Bitcoin standard" as they had with the gold standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Let's say, for example, a vendor is considering whether to begin accepting > bitcoin. She will need to be able feel relatively certain that, when she > leaves the storefront in the evening, she will have nearly the same amount > of value on balance when she returns the next morning.

Fortunately, vendors don't have to take on any such risk. There are services (e.g. CoinBase, BitPay) that let sellers accept bitcoin without ever holding a bitcoin balance. These services effectively instantly convert bitcoin revenue into something less volatile (e.g. USD).

<comment><USER9> that does not address the volatility issue at all - even if bitcoin are converted immediately to dollars or euros, because they fluctuate so wildly, no business would be able to know if the amount they receive will even cover their cost or if suddenly they are charging way way 'too much'.

<comment><USER8> Potentially they could internally set their prices in dollars, and multiply by the exchange rate to get their current bitcoin price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think BitCoin could be a great answer to the global dissatisfaction with the dollar as the world reserve currency. Why not use bitcoin as a non-political global reserve currency, and as an intermediary between national currencies, rather than as an everyday currency that intends to _replace_ anything.

</comment><comment><USER11> [http://blockchain.info/charts/tx-trade- ratio](http://blockchain.info/charts/tx-trade-ratio)

Transaction to Trade ratio is going up. For whatever reason, a significant portion of BTCs (in some data-points... as much as 60% of BTC transactions) have been in exchanges.

IE: BTC is probably going through a bubble right now, as any commodity. In the first few weeks of October, there were periods where MOST transactions were purely for speculation / trading.

[http://blockchain.info/charts/trade- volume](http://blockchain.info/charts/trade-volume)

Trade volume is on the rise. I don't know why or how, but a group of investors has decided to start speculating on BTCs.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

Instead, for BTC to be a "useful currency", people need to transfer BTCs between each other and stop speculating on BTC / USD exchanges. Whenever there is a rise of speculators, I'm going to bet on a bubble.

</comment><comment><USER12> One tidbit that continues to bother me regarding the long-term viability of bitcoin is how long the encryption processes it relies on will stay secure. IIRC bitcoin relies on ECDSA for signing and SHA-256 for hashing.

Pretty much all forms of encryption have a shelf-life until they are broken, especially when you consider quantum computing on the horizon. What happens when ECDSA becomes viable to break, or when they start finding SHA-256 collisions? Would the currency just collapse, or is there some way provided to change the system's cryptography methods?

<comment><USER13> Bitcoin was designed to be quantum-resistant and upgradeable: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Quantum_computers_would_bre...](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Quantum_computers_would_break_Bitcoin.27s_security)

<comment><USER14> Bitcoin was most certainly not designed to be quantum-resistant or upgradable (don't trust the wiki for these sorts of things). Thankfully we have discovered ways in it could be upgraded to be quantum-resistant without horribly breaking legacy nodes, but that's a very different statement.

<comment><USER13> 'Discovered'? If I may quote Satoshi [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=202.msg2133#msg2133](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=202.msg2133#msg2133) :

> True, if it happened suddenly. If it happens gradually, we can still > transition to something stronger. When you run the upgraded software for the > first time, it would re-sign all your money with the new stronger signature > algorithm. (by creating a transaction sending the money to yourself with the > stronger sig)

Hardly sounds like he's going 'guys! this is a serious problem but I just realized that we happen to have a work-around available!'...

<comment><USER14> That post doesn't address the underlying problem. How is the new signature opcodes introduced? How is consensus reached among a mix of nodes that may or may not understand the new signature scheme?

Back in 2010 this could have been handled by hard-forking and requiring everyone to upgrade. In fact in the very early days there were various hard- fork changes that were not even well documented at the time - you simply upgraded your client and things worked. That is no longer an option: the bitcoin ecosystem is simply too big.

Since then we've worked out ways in which soft-fork changes can be introduced which do not result in consensus errors. This was first tested in the wild with pay-to-script-hash in 2012. P2SH outputs are treated as anyone-can-claim outputs by older clients. More recently there has been work on proposals for adding Lamport signatures without the introduction of new opcodes. This is all definitely new work.

<comment><USER13> > Back in 2010 this could have been handled by hard-forking and requiring > everyone to upgrade.

...and it still can, since if QC breaking your bitcoins isn't enough motivation to upgrade, nothing is.

> This is all definitely new work.

Yes, if you insist any solution has to be soft-forking, then I suppose that's valuable new work which Satoshi did not expect...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is the volatility graph of Bitcoin in this article really representative?

Some people have mentioned that in the huge price spike in April, there were not actually that many people buying, and then there is this article on Bitcoin spreads that calls into question whether Mt. Gox is the best measure: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/beltway/2013/09/03/how- bitcoin-s...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/beltway/2013/09/03/how-bitcoin- spreads-violate-a-fundamental-economic-law/)

<comment><USER16> The spreads are so weird because of the difficulties with fiat currencies. Mt. Gox allows you to deposit/withdraw BTC no problem, but it charges a notorious premium if you want to withdraw USD. As a result, the BTC-USD prices are elevated by the premium.

Sites like Coinbase or Bitstamp that don't charge as much to deposit or withdraw will probably be a more accurate way to judge BTC-USD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The article is right on one point: Bitcoin is volatile. No one denies that.

However the article is wrong that "volatility must decrease for it to survive". If anything, the fact it has not only survived for 4 years, but succeeded by gaining market share and gaining value (1000x since 2010!) _despite_ its volatility shows that the market does not care that much about volatility.

<comment><USER18> I would say volatility must decrease for it to thrive. Bitcoin needs to transition from a currency for speculators to a currency for consumers.

<comment><USER17> Correct: thriving, not surviving. (I would not have made my remark, had the author used "thriving" in place of "surviving").

And we are not yet at the point where Bitcoin needs to reduce its volatility to further grow. My prediction is that there is still room for Bitcoin to grow (and it will), over the next 1-2 years, and yet volatility is going to remain just as pronounced as today. I say this because so far, its adoption curve shows no sign of slowing down.

<comment><USER19> Yet it looks exactly like the peak -> crash curve of its own history. People we claiming the same thing of real estate in the US in 2008 as well. Yet the correct analysis is still that there's no real reason for Bitcoin too grow - it can't extinguish tax obligations, and any move by governments to tax BTC profits will tank it because payment will have to be made in their currency, not BTC. No one has any reason to hold onto BTC if they're not speculating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Bitcoin has a market cap around $2 billion. To be a major currency, it needs a much larger cap, maybe a hundred billion. A major price increase would count as volatility but it's the only path from here to there.

<comment><USER21> It doesn't have to be a major currency. No one (I think) is suggesting it replace the dollar. Maybe it can be a minor currency that works along with the dollar. There are certain things you can do with bitcoins that you can't with fiat.

<comment><USER20> $100 billion would only be about the size of the Australian dollar. That seems like a feasible level to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Volatility doesn't bother as long as i can convert it to USD as fast and painless as i do with USD/EUR or Gold/USD.

But, i can't. So it's kinda worthless.

<comment><USER23> Ah, but that's improving rapidly. Coinbase does BTC->USD in less than 24 hours and USD->BTC instantly (with level 3 verified accounts).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Actual coins? That I can use at the store and in vending machines? That I can use at the restaurant to buy food?

<comment><USER25> I think a BTC-denominated debit/credit card would actually be the real sign of its mainstream viability.

The transaction speed is an issue for physical purchases too. Only checks take longer to clear, and they're pretty marginal.

<comment><USER26> That would kind of defeat the purpose of Bitcoin. The main advantage is the transaction system, rather than the store of value.

The transaction speed isn't really much of an issue as long as the block reward is much higher than the value of your transaction. For most modest transactions, like food and consumer goods, just seeing the transaction come across the network is good enough. It's possible to beat this, but doing so requires a large enough effort that nobody would bother doing it to get lunch when they could be getting dozens of block rewards worth thousands of times more instead. Waiting for one confirmation takes around 10 minutes and is likely to be good enough for anything of less value than buying houses and cars and other things that are 5+ figures in USD.

<comment><USER27> It would defeat the purpose of Bitcoin if it replaced Bitcoin. Since it would be built on top, it's just a service on a cryptocurrency foundation instead of whatever your government prints.

In that case a credit/debit card could basically be an immediate guarantee of payment (3rd party guarantees, collects small % to cover abuse/running costs. basically credit cards now, minus chargebacks), as opposed to what Bitcoin provides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Bitcoin volatility won't decrease for a _long_ time. Right now we're in the first major phase of Bitcoin's evolution, wherein the global financial system slowly wraps it's collective brain around what Bitcoin is, how it behaves, and what it's good for.

Even experts in cryptocurrency don't agree about any of those things, so global consensus about those three things is a long way off.

A few basics are starting to emerge:

* Bitcoin is good for transactions that governments don't want you to make.

* Bitcoin is good for transactions between vastly different financial and legal systems.

* Bitcoin is good for storing money in your brain.

* Some subset of people feel Bitcoin is a good investment.

But even now, there are many people with money, not to mention many financial experts, who are not so sure about these things. With every WSJ article we creep closer and closer to consensus, but it is still quite far off.

That said, eventually the global financial markets will start to agree about these uses, and a generally accepted model will emerge. I suspect this will take at least 20 years, which is the length of time it will take for us to start having University Faculty who went through their entire undergraduate education with Bitcoin existing and at least partially understood by their professors.

That model will be something like:

        Bitcoin market cap = I + f(V)

where V = volume of global transactions for which Bitcoin is the best choice

f(V) = the float required to make those transactions

I = the amount of capital for which Bitcoin is the best investment vehicle

And of course we need models for each of these... V is going to be some portion of illegal transactions, some portion of inter-border transactions, etc. We really have no idea what this is right now.

Until then the price of Bitcoin will be very chaotic, which will influence the I term, but not the V term. The V term is just a pure result of how many people have need for a Bitcoin-like currency, and what percentage of those people are aware of Bitcoin and have the technical means to use it.

BUT, when the global financial markets do start to reach consensus on the model, then Bitcoin will stabilize. And I don't mean it will stabilize as a deflationary currency, I mean it will literally be flat. Because the financial markets have NO problem pricing deflation into their models and they absolutely will. The price will go up to where you can't make money investing in Bitcoin during a reasonable slice of a human lifetime, and then level off.

And I suspect Bitcoin will stabilize MUCH more than traditional currencies. Because there will be no capriciousness of international politics or policy, the Bitcoin price model will be based on much more stable factors: global crime, global population, etc. And those things are much easier to model than things like U.S. foreign policy.

So anyone who is thinking either A) Bitcoin has a chance at stabilizing in the next 10 years, B) Bitcoin will deflate forever, or C) Bitcoin will never stabilize, I just don't agree. It's just going to take a while.

<comment><USER8> Could it be argued that:

      Gold Market Cap = I + f(V)

with V ≈ 0, since gold isn't used for many transactions? (AFAIK)

Why hasn't gold stabilized entirely? Are there reasons why it's affected by capricious international politics or policy, but Bitcoin won't be?

If I had to guess, I'd say that Bitcoin, like gold, will be affected by e.g. future economic delveragings that cause people to expect that the government might print money.

<comment><USER28> > Are there reasons why it's affected by capricious international politics or > policy, but Bitcoin won't be?

Well not being used for transactions probably makes it less stable. Gold is mostly just an investment, which means it can vary a lot based on the other available investment vehicles. Bitcoin has many real world uses, which I think will add stability.</comment></comment></comment>


Go Ahead, Post the Stupid Photo of Yourself from 10 Years Ago - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/go-ahead-do-10yearschallenge/580624/ <comment><USER2> So, the gist that I got from this was, " _There 's nothing that you can do about it, so you may as well just have fun._"

I can't decide which is the more disheartening part: That this is a reality in which we live in _or_ that someone's suggesting that we just accept it and try to have fun operating inside of it.

I'm going to go look at photos of puppies now...</comment>


Ask HN: What do you look for in an open-source project? - <AUTHOR> I think there are a few primary factors that lead people to contribute to open source projects: Am I a user of the software? Is there are clear path to get involved? etc.<p>I'm wondering what else people look for when searching for projects or deciding whether to start contributing? <comment><USER2> Licence...MIT is better</comment>


I created this new tab page extension. Offers widgets, custom apps and more - <AUTHOR> https://newtab.glaxosoft.com <comment><AUTHOR> Also added a firefox version. Opera doesn't allow changing new tab page so nothing for opera :(</comment>


Donald Knuth's Christmas Lecture: A Conjecture That Had To Be True [video] - <AUTHOR> http://scpd.stanford.edu/free-stuff/live-webinars-lectures/donald-knuths-annual-christmas-lecture <comment><USER2> (Reposting comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15882184](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15882184) lightly edited.)

I attended this on Thursday. Knuth started with a problem about rectangles inside rectangles ([https://imgur.com/faWRt2q](https://imgur.com/faWRt2q) — it's going to be an exercise in 18.104.22.168 of TAOCP when that's published, currently in the draft version of Pre-Fascicle 5C). He worked through some small cases, made a conjecture, showed a problem submitted to the Monthly, and lots of cool stuff with generating functions. The lecture was also peppered with jokes and cool stories, including a fascinating conjecture by Bill Gosper, who has a long history of coming up with these Ramanujan-like identities. He also showed a wonderful conjecture (involving queens on an infinite chessboard) that he thinks may never be proved, and showed a snippet of his CWEB program for the problem.

Knuth is turning 80 in about a month, and his talks seem to get better every year. (Though last year's lecture ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjZB9HvddQk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjZB9HvddQk)) on Hamiltonian Paths in Antiquity, which among other things covers Sanskrit poems that satisfy a "knight's tour" constraint, holds a special place in my heart — been planning to elaborate on it.)

<comment><USER3> Me too!

Another important thing to mention is that Knuth has a great sense of humor.

<comment> cup-of-tea Indeed. I recently got my own copy of "The TeXbook" after having had it on long loan from my university library many years. It's simply a joy to read and surely one of the best software manuals ever published.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This talk excited me as if I had learned a new programming paradigm. Sometimes I come up with little problems in the shower, not unlike this one, but then when I sit down with pen and paper, after working with a few examples, I hear a little voice saying like "what's the point on working on this? I'm no mathematician, and this is probably just a footnote on some 1000-year-old mathematics textbook anyway."

To see Knuth work methodically through this seemingly trivial problem and get something out of it was enlightening.

<comment><USER2> Indeed! He mentions something related at 5:00 in the video ([https://youtu.be/BxQw4CdxLr8?t=300](https://youtu.be/BxQw4CdxLr8?t=300)):

> You know, people think that mathematicians have been working for hundreds of > years and now there's tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of > mathematicians all spending every day working on problems so how could you > possibly still find a simple down-to-earth problem that hasn't already been > studied, you know, way too much? And the answer is: those problems aren't > rare at all, they keep coming up several times a year, and this is an > example where even this very basic problem of rectangle into rectangles has > all kinds of, sort of, stones not yet turned.

And the other thing you mentioned is one of the reasons it's always a pleasure for me to see Knuth's talks or read his work — he is one of the mathematicians (like Euler and unlike Gauss) who make it seem simple: we get the impression that we could do it too, if we spent enough time on it, that things are within reach for us, just barely. This is so inspiring. And then of course when you step back and look at his body of work, it's staggering! (Something like this talk may account for about half a page of Knuth's published output, and he has thousands of them…) That's additionally inspiring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those of us that struggle with his cadence of speech, are transcripts available online?

<comment><USER6> Yes. It's difficult to listen to live. I'm (we're?) not knocking Knuth - he's brilliant; he's just hard to follow. Once he gets going, he gets tripped up with all that's going on in his head and the "uh uh um" throws off the flow.

<comment><USER7> I think that's just how old people talk sometimes.

<comment><USER8> It's got nothing to do with his age, as far as I can tell Don Knuth has always spoken this way (though I suspect it may have gotten more pronounced [ no pun intended ] as he has gotten older).

I agree with what others have said. I think he just has 50 things going through his mind at any one moment, and the part of his brain that is controlling his speech just isn't always sure which of those 50 things it should be sharing at that moment.

I think any of us would be fortunate to be half as brilliant as he is. And the best part is, it is so obvious that he is one of the most humble and likeable people on the planet. Always generous, patient, and never arrogant. I personally would travel a great distance just to have lunch with the man, if ever given the opportunity.

A prime example in this video is the person who keeps interrupting him to tell him he had missed a line in his diagram. To be honest, my first reaction (after the guy had repeated it for like the 4th time or something) I was a little perturbed, and wished the guy would just shut up and let Don continue. But what was Don's reaction? After he finally understood what the guy was saying, he saw the error, corrected his mistake, and _thanked_ the guy for "saving him 20 minutes".

Thank you Don Knuth! Not only are you brilliant, humble, hard-working and kind, you are a gentleman's gentleman, and the the world needs more men like you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is the K in his name actually not silent? Huh. I've been calling him "Nooth" for ages. That's going to be hard to unlearn.

<comment><USER10> [http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/faq.html](http://www-cs- faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/faq.html)

 _How do you pronounce your last name?

Ka-NOOTH._

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thank $DEITY for "youtube-dl". It's a bummer that Stanford can't afford to host its own videos, though.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is tangential to the topic, but of you use TeX or any related system (latex, texinfo, cweb, metapost, etc.), please consider becoming a TUG (TeX User Group) member. They rely on membership and donations to keep going (and there are some tangible benefits to being a member, too).

[https://tug.org/join.html](https://tug.org/join.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Anyone here know how I can get ahold of knuth without email? Hit my email in profile. I would like to help him finish his proof.

<comment><USER2> \- See [https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html](https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html) — just send a letter to his Stanford address.

\- You may have misinterpreted the talk. There's already a proof (even for the closed form of the leading coefficient), by someone (I have the name written down somewhere but it's in the video). You might enjoy submitting a solution to the AMM problem instead (which only asks for the rate of growth, but if you have a fuller proof I'm sure that's good).

<comment><USER14> In the video Donald refers to Walter Stromquist.</comment></comment></comment>