Too Clever by Half - <AUTHOR> http://epsilontheory.com/too-clever-by-half/ <comment><USER2> I really enjoyed this article.

 _Summary_

Coyotes are too clever because they know that people shaking jars full of coins can't hurt them. Thus the animal control patrol has to get called and when they don't shoo, the animal control person who loves animals has to shoot the coyote.

Coyotes are winning the mini-game of each human interaction, but they are losing the meta-game of what society will do if coyotes aren't scared.

 _Personal Connection_

This reminds me of a turning point that I had in high school. When I was young, I would get in trouble and try to get around the rules each time I got in trouble. /"Well, technically…"/

But at some point I realized that most of the time you aren't getting in trouble because you are breaking the rules. You are getting in trouble because you are making the rule makers unhappy. Once I had that realization I was able to focus on relationships with the rule makers and figure out what they actually cared about. This allowed me to break the rules just as much but without getting in trouble.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that the rule makers in high schools are sometimes (often?) incredibly petty people with a very poor understanding of human psychology and communication, not tremendously much empathy for the students, and very little personal consequence when they make a mistake even if that has drastic consequences for the student (and as a result little time spent introspecting about their mistakes). I never got in particularly much trouble, but many of my friends were screwed by minor miscommunication which incompetent adults escalated beyond any reason.

And yes, under the circumstances (assuming the goal is to avoid problems, instead of to aggravate the staff, perform ad-hoc psychology experiments, or the like), any high school student should avoid contradicting the staff in public, start by acquiescing to any request that doesn't pose an immediate injury risk, disengage quickly and completely and then marshal their parents' help if there has been any kind of mistake that will affect them academically.

Few teenagers have figured this out though. To any high school rule makers out there, please read _How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk_, [https://amzn.com/1451663889/](https://amzn.com/1451663889/) and in general, please try to treat the students with basic respect.

<comment> temp-dude-87844 It's not just kids, is it? This is pretty much the canonical and most self- preserving way of interacting with anyone who has power over you and is in a clear and present situation to apply it: school officials, police officers, appeal adjudicators at companies who you try to turn to if you think there's been some bureaucratic mistake, military personnel of a foreign power in your country for reasons beyond your control, and even an abusive spouse -- much to the dismay of advocates everywhere.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I think you are right. In this sense, high school prepares children/teens for the real life really well. :-(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I read the entire article.

My take: don't bother unless you have some time and are looking to be mildly entertained (very mildly IMO).

It's fluff. The central analogy is a little amusing but doesn't even roughly fit reality.

In chasing its premise the article ignores a key dynamic of "financial innovation" schemes, which is that the schemers largely avoid the negative consequences of their schemes. Well, the money spigot stops at some point, which the schemers see as a tragedy, but they generally aren't losing too much of what they grabbed before the end. In 2008, I think most had to endure talk of losing their bonuses (not actually loss of bonuses, just talk and sometimes a temporary delay). The real consequence is that they have to get back to work building up a new scheme so they can do it all again.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, basically nobody went to jail, and yet, he considers Bear Sterns losing its independent existence to be the equivalent of a coyote getting shot? Sloppy thinking there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is unrelated, but they mention The Great Financial Crisis which made me remember the Recession of my youth.

It devastated my family. My father was in construction. That market seriously ebbs.

I remember a faint feeling I had back then: resentment towards families who happened to be in industries that weren't hit.

Not because I thought it was unfair that we were hit, I just resented that they didn't even have to notice what was happening.

And I just had to check myself about this Great Financials Crisis. Lucky timing, I have been pretty employable the last 20 years. The "crisis" was always a political skirmish to me. I cared about it, but it seemed small compared to past crises.

Just now it occurred to me though, that whatever millions of people are going through exactly what I did, their families collapsing.

And I'm the one can not notice that.

I'd like to securitize those families.

<comment><USER8> Reminds me of what I've heard called a Czech fable:

A poor farmer whose livestock is a single dairy cow goes to the field one morning to milk the cow and discovers that she's dead. He falls to his knees and looks skyward, shaking his fists and cursing God for his misfortune. Suddenly a voice is heard from the heavens: "Your cries have reached me, my son. Tell me what you would like me to do." The farmer gazes upward and says to God, "Please, Lord, kill my neighbor's cow."

<comment><USER9> If your neighbor loses his job it's a recession. If you lose your job it's a depression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Okay. Let's slow down here:

The OP says.

>> And they're not that smart. I'd put our barn cat up against a raccoon any day on any sort of cognitive test. We think raccoons are clever because they have those anthropomorphic paws and those cute little masks and even a Marvel superhero with its own toy line, but please. Raccoons are takers, not schemers.

From Wikipedia

>> Zoologist Clinton Hart Merriam described raccoons as "clever beasts", and that "in certain directions their cunning surpasses that of the fox." The animal's intelligence gave rise to the epithet "sly coon".[120] Only a few studies have been undertaken to determine the mental abilities of raccoons, most of them based on the animal's sense of touch. In a study by the ethologist H. B. Davis in 1908, raccoons were able to open 11 of 13 complex locks in fewer than 10 tries and had no problems repeating the action when the locks were rearranged or turned upside down. Davis concluded they understood the abstract principles of the locking mechanisms and their learning speed was equivalent to that of rhesus macaques.

Learning speed equivalent to the macaques? You gotta be kidding me. These creatures are underestimated and the author might just not like them?

I mean, look at his eyes: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Raccoon_climbing_in_tree_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Raccoon_climbing_in_tree_- _Cropped_and_color_corrected.jpg) That guy looks really smart and self aware.

<comment><USER11> I am a big fan of raccoons as well. I think they are hilarious. They are just smart enough to seem stupid if that makes any sense.

<comment><USER12> I think one's feelings on racoons vary by where you live. Here in the semi- suburban New Hampshire they're not much of an issue: if you have a decent trash can you'll never know they are there. I imagine a owning a farm would color one's perspective, especially based on the author's suggestion that they kill more than they need.

I'm fairly neutral on coyotes but we've never lost an animal to them. I like their haughtiness, though I can get the same from the fox that lives around here somewhere without as much worry about what she might do to our pets.

It's really just the bear paw print that worries me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The only issue with his metaphor is that coyotes have been doing very well at the meta game. At the time of European contact there were no coyotes anywhere near Connecticut. Lewis and Clark didn't encounter them until they hit the great plains. Actually only a few decades ago there were no coyotes near the eastern US.

But coyotes are clever and they've learned to adapt and live in close proximity to humans. And as we've changed the landscape and removed & added various animals and plants to the landscape they've found niches that work for them and have expanded their range greatly.

<comment><USER14> Slightly OT but the evidence we have strongly suggests that exterminating the wolf is the primary reason for the expansion of the range of the coyote to most of the continental USA.

[http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170516-when-wolves- return-t...](http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170516-when-wolves-return-to- the-wild-everything-changes)

<comment><USER15> Here in Ontario (and likely elsewhere), the majority of coyotes are actually coywolves ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf)). We have them on the property regularly and they are no problem at all, but they are larger and more adaptable than the coyote of old.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The true meta-gamer of the story snuck by with a single sentence reference.

So I'm calling you out barn cat. You think you can sneak by having your cake and keeping your solidarity and standoff distance from the humans but also benefit from the free housing + healthcare + steady food when you don't want to kill mice + affection when you decide to wander over to the main house.

But I'm onto you.

<comment><USER17> Actually the parasite infestation (fleas), lack of affection and food when they want it (except through hard work), temperature variations, etc...make the barn cat a misanthrope.

Every house cat owner knows that the house cat is the 'meta game mastermind'. Hell, they've engineered the system to care about their safety so much that it is cruelty to have them reproduce via the species own painful biology. Letting them out into the street is homicidal. If they get pests they inflict them on their caretaker and every other discomfort is communicated to the human caretaker willy nilly. When they want to exert themselves they can be amazingly cruel, subtle, unpredictable and unyielding. House cats win.

<comment><USER11> I'm not a fan of having house cats. Indoor only cats develop weird psychological issues at a rate that makes me suspect that living inside isn't all that healthy for them.

Every cat I have owned has been an indoor-outdoor cat. There are downsides. They tend to be less affectionate and more independent than house cats, but they also seem healthier and happier than the indoor cats I have known.

Also they don't need a litter box. That is a biggy.

<comment><USER17> Well, having an indoor cat means keeping an indoor cat happy which is a larger problem (for the caretaker) but indicative of the meta supremacy in house cat behavior.

In all seriousness I would rather take the time to care for a house cat than to deal with the possibility of roadkill/injury, disease, pests or other accidents of nature. If the cat is a problem for you then don't own one?

<comment><USER18> On the other hand, I figure that yes, a cat (which I'll never have - allergies) is safe indoors, but if they're happier outdoors... well, maybe nature will happen, but should I really imprison the cat to save it? Not as far as I'm concerned. The cat can go enjoy itself.

The point being, it's not that the cat is a problem. It's that some of us think nature should remain natural, not be pressed into service keeping us company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When I was in school, there were the people who seemed smart and the people who seemed like they worked hard.

The people who seemed smart won the minigames. They got good grades with little effort. But somehow, they ended up with no institutional support -- in fact, the school hated them. Eventually one of the teachers (who was visibly insecure about her own intelligence and competence) cooked up a nonsense pretext to get some of them expelled.

One kid's parents brought a legal challenge, the school settled for a year's worth of college tuition, and last I heard his parents had withdrawn him from college to pack him off to rehab for heroin addiction. The only other expellee I've heard from left the country, never to return.

The people who seemed like they worked hard didn't always get the best grades. But the institution went out of its way to make life easier for them, and they're all doing alright now.

<comment><USER20> People hate their superiors unfortunately. This is why I think rich/high IQ parents need to put their kids around other rich/high IQ kids: proles/low IQs will tear your children apart out of jealousy, possibly leading to mental disorders and drug addictions

<comment><USER12> That does not seem like a recipe for a solid society. And suggesting the poor are the cause of the rich's mental problems & substance abuse is . . . well, it's something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Appropriately, this article is a slightly-too-clever way of talking about three things at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER22> The most relevant take away from this article (for me) is how the coyotes (crypto and currency experts) invented Bitcoins, raccoons over leveraged it out of dumb greed (investors) and the state took notice and acted out of sheer desperation to not lose control and once again rendered the invention useless by gaining more control than before (the part that is currently in its early stages right now).

Update:

I think the article insinuates an interesting take on the invention of cryptocurrencies (by coyotes), their bubble (by raccoons) and their suppression (by the state). But IMO in this case, the state suppressed the invention not just because they fear what the coyotes have produced but also what raccoons have done with it (with the whole ICO bubble, etc.).

<comment><USER23> Of course, bitcoin's own limitations would've prevented it's widespread use, with or without the over-speculation (lack of throughput and excessive energy consumption).

<comment><USER22> That's true. The idea holds up better if looked at from an all cryptocurrencies perspective rather than only Bitcoin.

Also because states aren't just trying to control / suppress Bitcoin alone but all cryptocurrencies. For example, here in India the central bank has banned all cryptocurrencies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > The coyotes know _exactly_ where the invisible fence begins and ends, > without the benefit of _ever_ wearing a shock collar. How do I know? Because > they intentionally leave their scat on their side of the invisible fence, > creating a demilitarized zone as precise and as well-observed as anything on > the Korean peninsula. Occasionally a coyote will try to test our dogs by > leaving its scat juuusst over the line on our side of the DMZ.

My question is, why does the human think coyote scat on the other side of the line was precisely placed and scat on his side of the line is an intentional provocation? A more reasonable explanation is that the coyotes don't know exactly where the invisible line is.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think the metaphor is a stretch, especially when applied to Bitcoin. There were many factors which played a part in the financial crisis, including the following non-exhaustive list which were not mentioned is the essay:

\- By bailing out big banks and other institutions, the government signaled to these institutions to pile on risk because they'd just be saved by the government when things went bad

\- Policy which gave incentives for risky mortgages under the intention of helping the poor

\- Tax policy continuing to give incentives for people to buy houses instead of renting

</comment><comment><USER26> > Coyotes can change the world. (But) Not if they fetishize ANY financial > instrument as an intrinsic aspect of a commitment to liberty and justice for > all. Because it's not.

This. In <blink> and <marquee> tags

</comment><comment><USER27> I take issue with the way he describes securitization as if it's some horrible evil. Securitization (and financialization in general) just takes big balls of intertwined risks and breaks them apart into little balls of (theoretically) consistent risk so that everyone can get the amount of risk they desire.

Imagine a company that has a single customer. There's a 50/50 chance that the customer will pay. If the customer pays then the company makes a ton of profit, if the customer doesn't pay then the company goes out of business.

For the company, this is probably more risk than they want to take. But there's probably hedge fund out there who has enough money to survive the customer not paying and is willing to take that risk for a fee. So the company can go to the hedge fund and say "if the customer pays us in the future we'll give you all the money. In exchange give us 40% of it right now".

And the company is happy because they have a 100% chance of staying in business. And the hedge fund is happy because (if the risk was priced correctly) they have a positive expected value in the trade.

That's all securitization is.

<comment><USER28> That's true in that it's what securitization is _meant to be_ but unfortunately as was seen in the mid-2000's it proved extremely difficult to accurately price the little balls of risk and the money being made in doing the selling and breaking apart those balls provided an incentive for people to keep the pipeline of loans going well past what was prudent.

In the UK we ended up with all sort of shenanigans like "self-certified mortgages" where the person taking out the loan was allowed to certify their ability to repay. with that kind of product it's very difficult to classify risk of non-repayment as you can't believe the evidence provided (necessarily).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> PayPal was one of the few financial innovators to dodge animal control. They were first and they were fast.

<comment><USER30> And they were compliant. Their business model was not "you can use this new form of money to mail order cocaine".

<comment><USER31> I don't think they really care about the drug trade near as much as large scale tax avoidance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The State still cannot tell the Coyotes from Raccoons. Especially so because neither of them show there form truly until the deed is done. Thus the Coyote population control. The utopia of a Coyote population playing the meta game will indeed happen some day - just that the time isn't right. Yet! So the same Animal Control that goes around looking for masked men with rifles, also chases those who leak the rightful information to the People. The question is not who is right - the question is are the People ready? And what's the ratio of Coyote's to Raccoons. And how exactly do you tell them apart pre-facto.

<comment><USER21> I think because the raccoons are in the government. If Bear Stearns is a coyote, Goldman Sachs is a raccoon. They don't mind breaking stuff for profit, and yet they always get some people in every single US government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Reminds me of when Andy Dufresne thought he was protecting himself when he told the warden he'd never tell anyone about cooking his books.

<comment><USER34> what scene in shawshank are you referring to

<comment><USER35> The scene where Andy Dufresne told the warden he'd never tell anyone about cooking his books

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Closes the article by implying that the federal government is a monolithic political entity ("the State") that stands apart from private financial interests.

And then quotes Jesus.

Way to stay true to your roots.

</comment><comment><USER37> If you enjoyed this article and especially the parallel between animal populations and human behavior. I recommend reading about [1] Evolutionarily Stable Strategy and specificly the book [2] The Selfish Gene by [3] Richard Dawkins.

The gist of it is that survival strategies are only viable given the distribution of the behavior throughout the entire species or population. Similar to a finicial market, some strategies work only when a small percentage of the population exhibits the behavior.

A bonus is that, like the phrase Too Clever by Half, Dawkins is also British.

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER38> At least part of the point of the article seems to be about narrow specialization creating blinders that inhibit deep strategic thinking.

I can see very strong parallels with systems thinking and the role that systems engineers play within the V-model.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm not sure what the connection was, exactly, but this story talking about coyotes and raccoons in finance gave me an epiphany of understanding about Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

</comment><comment><USER40> He's just saying block chain is the next CDS(credit default swaps)

<comment><USER41> ...but for individual instead of for institutional investors:

> _Turns out that B̶i̶t̶c̶o̶i̶n̶ a AAA-rated tranche of Alt-A mortgages wasn't > the store of value that coyote-math "proved" it was, to the detriment of > i̶n̶d̶i̶v̶i̶d̶u̶a̶l̶ institutional investors who put a significant portion > of their portfolio into these securities, and to the ruin of those who used > leverage to acquire these securities._

<comment><USER40> I think opensourced block chain implementation is way more transparent than the bundled derivative instruments the bankers made. The problem is that people will still invest in stuff like shit coins or use stuff like Tether where nothing is transparent

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Argh - please dang, can we have subtitles, or something, to reduce the numbers of clickbait non-descriptive titles.

Sincerely,

Infuriated of Norwich.

</comment><comment><USER43> Fun article, interesting point, and I don't even necessarily disagree (entirely, anyway), BUT: coyotes have a larger range now than they have had since long before humans showed up in North America, largely because humans cleared out their main competitors, the wolves. And raccoons are not stupid, although they are destructive.

So, I get what the author is trying to say with this little parable, but the fact that the central facts it is using (coyotes losing out, raccoons are stupid) are both false, it makes me more than a little suspicious of the conclusion, when I otherwise might not be.

</comment><comment><USER44> If any animal has won the meta-game it's the cats. Yes, those adorable, cute, dumb bastards. They badly lose on any tactical level. But man, win on the strategical level so much.

<comment><USER45> We got some kibble from an aunt that the cat isn't keen on. She'll eat it if and only if she's starving and it's the only stuff around. Also we use a feed puzzle tower where she has to paw the kibble through holes to get it into the "bowl". We mixed the bunk kibble with the good stuff to try to coax her to eat it, but she sniffs each kibble and ignores the inferior stuff.

Well, the bunk kibble is round and likes to roll away. So in the course of getting at the good stuff, the round garbage unworthy for the princess scatters everywhere, gets stepped on, attracts ants, etc. Well, I'm left with a tupperware full of the mixed kibble that I have to use up, so I just pour it into the bowl so it doesn't scatter. Pesky poking has given way to the buffet.

I don't know if you knew you were playing, but good game, cat, good game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Very interesting. One might also say something like "half measures break the whole." The conclusion drawn about the State getting stronger and weakening mobility for coyotes seems like a legitimate concern too.

In the case of Bitcoin, being such a foray into uncharted territory, I'm unsure of how you would be good at the meta game, or figure out how racoons will abuse your radical new idea. Maybe I need to improve my meta game, heh.

</comment><comment><USER47> Perhaps the post itself is too clever by half. It was about "why Bitcoin is going to fail" and yet all anyone is discussing is its well-told animal analogy.

<comment><USER48> Probably because it's pretty obvious that Bitcoin is going to fail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> >But the trait that ALL domesticated species demonstrate relative to their wild species is a smaller brain. I'd bet it's happening with humans, too, but that's just an observation for another day.

It is: [http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans- smart-...](http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-why- brain-shrinking)

<comment><USER50> Associating brain size with intelligence is facile. As the article points out, no one knows why cranial volume is shrinking, and there's no clear connection to intellect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This reminds me of the scene in the Indiana Jones movie when someone comes up and starts challenging Indy with a bunch of flashy sword moves. Rather than engage him that level, where he is definitely outclassed, Indy simply draws his pistol and shoots him: [https://youtu.be/anEuw8F8cpE](https://youtu.be/anEuw8F8cpE)

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm curious about what people appreciate in this essay. In the end, I don't think I learned anything valuable from it.

<comment><USER41> That you can be clever and win and still lose, and someone less smart may actually do better. I ignored the second half (read it though) because I thought it was quite a stretch from the coyotes to financial instruments. Actually, it's _all_ quite a stretch as far as the details go, while the general idea that I stated at the beginning is true but not exactly original.

<comment><USER52> I think the take away is basically that you're optimizing for the the sum of all series, which means that focusing on winning either the battle or the war by itself is fruitless and counterproductive.

I agree, in a lot of ways, I prefer to make situations win-win because it leads to better long term outcomes. It's as much about framing as it is about succeeding in the short or long term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> _They are, to use the wonderful Brit phrase, too clever by half...not good in the meta-game. And the meta-game has turned against the coyotes with a vengeance._

Here's the thing about the meta-game: It's very contextual. Coyotes can't play the meta-meta-game of thinking about your context and possibly changing it. Some human beings can.

</comment><comment><USER54> Slightly OT: For us on our farm back in Iowa, the clever animals were the raccoons. It got to the point where we had to put locks with keys on the grain bins; metal hooks and clasps---even some requiring refined motor skills to open---were not enough to keep the buggers out. Fortunately, they couldn't pick the locks. :)

</comment><comment><USER55> There is a pretty good book about the history of the Coyote - Coyote America by Dan Flores.

</comment><comment><USER56> I've long had the suspicion that in domesticating animals, we've dumbed them down severely. And I sometimes wonder if humans were smarter before civilization replaced evolution as the driving factor for intelligence.

<comment><USER57> > And I sometimes wonder if humans were smarter before civilization replaced > evolution as the driving factor for intelligence.

this is an odd proposition. evolution has not been replaced; rather, the evolutionary pressures have changed. in any case, civilization is not much more than 10,000 years old, which is pretty short in evolutionary timescales.

and although we employ some measures (ie social services) to prevent the weakest from dying outright, it seems like long term strategic thought is more important than ever. for instance, it takes 5-7 years for a high school grad to get a master's degree. can you really envision an adult hunter-gatherer working towards something for that long without seeing the fruits of their labor? their environment mandated a much shorter term focus to avoid starvation or lethal competition from other humans.

<comment><USER56> Well, if humans haven't changed in 10,000 years then the author's thought that domesticated animals are different is also false.

<comment><USER58> What are you basing that assertion on? For starters, animals had way more generations than humans in those 10,000 years - probably by an order of magnitude or 2 depending on the animal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I'm quite amused to see all that veiled scaremongering when it comes to crypto, even if it has a grain of truth. Yeah, truly the ones who get involved in it can be thought of as either coyotes or raccoons, but I think prohibition and "the war on drugs" only shows how much can something be made desirable by making it unfit for public consumption, and at that point the animal simile breaks down.

Not to mention that, as other commenters have mentioned, coyotes have been rather successful in spite of human encroachment, just like cryptocurrencies grow stronger in the face of looming regulation and sanction. Sure, it might scare off some raccoons and kill some coyotes in the short term, but it's going to be still there. And for all the "coyote institutions" that perished, there are still many more.

<comment><USER45> I don't know if it's scaremongering because I'm not entirely sure what point the writer is getting at. The angle I chose to read is that, cryptos acting all "You can regulate us, because distributed blockchain! Muahaha!" is the 1st order game, akin to the coyote calling bluff on the noisy can.

Government types developing an ill will towards the defiant cryptos is the neighborhood moms getting pissed at the bold coyote.

The animal control is the 2nd order game. Regulators come in and crack down on cryptos. Put the squeeze on exchanges, make it hard to cash out to legal tender.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> What do people think of his connection between Credit Default Swaps and all these ICOs?

<comment><USER50> I don't see any useful insight in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Hands down one of the best reads I have had in a longgg while

</comment><comment> coyote-w-912 The author describes how coyotes win the "skirmish game" when they casually walk into suburban yards and demonstrate that they are not afraid of the humans when they do things to scare them away such as make loud noises at them. However, they lose the "meta-game" when animal control shows up and puts them down because they won't go away.

The author uses this analogy to compare coyotes to financial innovators. His argument is that every time financial innovation gets out of control and the economy at large is impacted, larger powers step in and squash it. He argues tha this is what happened in the 2008 financial crisis with mortage backed securities, and that this is the same thing happening now with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

I disagree with the parallel he draws to cryptocurrencies.

While I don't necessarily think cryptocurrencies will dominate the world, and Governments may even succeed in reigning them in, they aren't in the same category as other financial innovation.

Mortgage backed securites were the coyotes stalking across the laws of suburban moms, hoping animal control wouldn't interfere.

Cryptocurrencies are a coordinated attack by a pack of coyotes on animal control headquarters.

They were designed specifically to be as government-resistant as possible. Now, animal control has a lot of firepower and they can call in reinforcements. Governments have a lot of resources and powers they can draw on to stop and regulate cryptocurrencies. However, these coyotes are well aware of the meta-game, who the true enemy is and they're gunning hard for him.

Before bitcoin, no currency that wasn't backed by a government lasted long before being shut down by a government entity. Bitcoin has been going for nine years now, and in that time further innovation has given us Monero and Zcash which are even more censorship and surveillance resistant.

The primary attack vector, the only one that's worked, has been made by the "racoons" at Blockstream and their investors from Visa and the banking industry. This is a much more subtle attack than direct government intervention. In a nut-shell, when Satoshi left the project, he left a guy named Gavin Andresen in charge. Gavin trusted the wrong person with commit access to the project, who was co-opted by the banking industry and who then booted him from access. Thos current group of developers crippled Bitcoin by repeatedly refusing to expand the block size and moving forward developing the "Lightning Network" which is nothing more than a copy of the current inter- bank payment system and which, quite frankly doesn't work.[1][2] They also took over the r/bitcoin subreddit as well as the bitcointalk forum and completely censored it.[3]

The fact that the racoons have taken this more subtle approach, suggests to me that the enemies of Bitcoin now believe that attempts to shut it down by more direct mean will fail.

However there are still a lot of coyotes working on other cryptocurrency projects. These coyotes are clearly playing the meta-game, and for now they're winning.

[1] Summary of what the lightning network is: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g) [2] Discussion of a developer who tried to implement micropayments with lightning network, but had to switch because it did not work well: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew2MWVtNAt0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew2MWVtNAt0) [3] A (brief and incomplete) history of censorship in /r/Bitcoin: [https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete- histor...](https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-history-of- censorship-in-r-bitcoin-c85a290fe43)

<comment><USER62> It would be pretty easy for the government to shut down any cryptocurrencies it cared too: go after the exchanges. This is already happening by making them follow the know your customer regulations that banks have had to follow for years. But I think you're being a little to cynical. I don't think the government cares that much about bitcoin except to the extent that it allows people to get around existing laws, and its high potential for abuse by unscrupulous business people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Truly HN quality post!

</comment><comment><USER64> > I'd bet it's happening with humans, too, but that's just an observation for > another day.

Ho Ho!

Tell me more brother. I am curious.

This links up with David Krakauer's ideas I'll bet.

</comment><comment><USER65> >I know, I know … it's negative reinforcement

No it isn't. It's positive punishment.

</comment><comment><USER66> Oh no, poor finance jerkoffs got ripped off by their own cleverness.

Nothing says dbag like Alabama man who now lives in Connecticut crying over dead asshole financial firms.

We've had 4 (or more) of these banking/finance ripoffs in my fucking lifetime. Bankers and finance assholes are the scourge of mankind.

I got a degree in Finance just so I could avoid the bullshit these fucking assholes use to rip everyone off. A State Bank as the author is so scared of, like the one in North Dakota, won't run into any of these issues. Because their goal isn't profit at any cost, it's providing banking and investment services.

tl;dr; fuck this guy

<comment><USER62> A local commercial bank and a New York investment bank are really different things. The financial industry has caused some large problems, but it's also a big part of why the modern world works as well as it does. I don't think you're being charitable in your criticism of the article.

<comment><USER66> The modern world works well for whom?

Laughable.

<comment><USER62> When would you rather be alive? There are tons of problems with the world today and many that we can fix but aren't. But the idea that things are worse now than before is just not true.

<comment><USER67> The idea that our measurement of progress only needs to be binary (did we or didn't we progress?) shows indifference to the endless problems yet unsolved. Better than yesteryear doesn't mean good enough. Far from it.

<comment><USER62> I don't view progress as binary. That some things are worse now than in the past is a banal and uninteresting point, but it's clear that the world is much better now than it was even 50 years ago for the average person by virtually any metric that matters: number of people living in poverty, childhood mortality, life expectancy, chances of being persecuted for your religion, race, or sexual orientation. The list goes on.

There are obviously tons of problems still but the improvements that have been made are vast. I get that we still have a lot of progress to make, but the cynicism of the person I was replying to is inappropriate when you look at the facts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> It's really sad to see this article about animal abuse on the front page of HN.

<comment><USER69> You did not read until the part he starts drawing parallels between Bitcoin and the 2008 mortgage crash.

<comment><USER70> Nevermind that - what animal abuse? r4unwud, I didn't see any animal abuse mentioned in the article.

<comment><USER71> They are referring to the zap collar being used on the dogs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I was reading this in Dwight K Shrute's voice. lol

</comment><comment><USER73> >> When the dog gets close to the wire, the receiver starts to beep, and when the dog gets all the way to the "fence" boundary, the receiver generates a small electric zap. I know, I know … it's negative reinforcement and it's a shock collar and all that. Don't care. It's fantastic for us and our dogs.

That's disgusting.

<comment><USER74> How would you keep a dog from straying into the wild and getting injured? These are pets and not wild animals able to survive in the bush on their own.

<comment><USER75> Talking with a friend recently about how "wild" our pet dogs are. In the local area, dogs get out at night and form packs that hunt calves and lambs and simply kill them and leave the bodies.

There is a good business in hunting feral cats and dogs that were pets and have been left to fend for themselves in the wild because they were no longer wanted.

<comment><USER76> It's changed as the demographics shifted and the county urbanized but thirty years ago the local sheriff still issued deputy animal control papers to hunters, farmers, woodsmen, etc. who reported dog packs. There are fewer farms, greater housing density, more posted land, revised laws, and different attitudes toward animal control (generally, better) but the problem still occasionally comes up. Feral dogs aren't just a semi-rural problem, this was the situation in Brooklyn [https://gowanuslounge.blogspot.com/2007/07/dog- days-remember...](https://gowanuslounge.blogspot.com/2007/07/dog-days- remember-red-hook-gowanus-wild.html) and resulted in a handful of publicized attacks on joggers and pets.

<comment><USER75> The dogs I referred to are not feral as such. They are pets to someone. It is when they get together in packs that their behaviour goes wild. The owners are often unaware that their dogs have wandered about and partaken in killing of stock.

It is also applicable to cats.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Web Phone Called ooma - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2007/tc20070718_689941.htm?chan=rss_topStories_ssi_5 Business Week telecom reporter Olga Kharif writes today about a new VoIP startup called "ooma." (Yet another example of lousy brand names due to cybersquatters). <comment><USER2> heh, in my home language ouma means 'granny', and therefore ooma and its pronunciation in English is almost identical :)</comment>


Elowan: A plant-robot hybrid that drives itself towards light - <AUTHOR> https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/elowan-a-plant-robot-hybrid/overview/ <comment><USER2> so simple and so cool

i sometimes wonder if plants can predict (roughly) weather conditions (e.g. rainfall, temperature extremes) years in advance. and if so, can we network them and come up with better predictions.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just add Alexa support, and set it up to bark when it needs water, and you have the future of pets - autonomous plants.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this named after the plant-people in the game "Starflight"? Quality game...</comment>


A self-published riff on Hamlet broke every Kickstarter record. - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/08/ryan_north_s_kickstarter_hamlet_adventure_to_be_or_not_to_be_reviewed.html <comment><USER2> Technically, that book was not "self-published," rather it was published by my company, breadpig (which also publishes xkcd, SMBC, and some other fun things like Story War!).

If you're inspired, you can buy the book here: [http://breadpig.com/products/to-be-or-not-to- be](http://breadpig.com/products/to-be-or-not-to-be)

It'll be available in bookstores nationwide soon enough!

<comment><USER3> How do you define "published by"?

I define it as paying for production, and distributing the product..

<comment><USER2> Responsible for: paying* + coordinating the people who get produce the product (this includes the author herself, the designers providing art, the person doing the layout, the editor, and the printer - down to helping the authors choose paper stock); distributing the product - we do direct sales, as well as have the contract with PGW, a distributor, that lets us get into bookstores (sad but true, we had to get one before Barnes and Noble would stock xkcd: volume 0); we have a warehouse in Austin (Hi Amplifier!) that handles all the fulfillment for kickstarter rewards, we manage that relationship to make sure every address-change is accounted for and everyone gets their perks; in the case of this kickstarter, we're also the ones coordinating with manufacturers to make everything from bookmarks to plushie-skulls; we do a wee bit of promotion, but that's how we can afford to give authors (75%+) of the profits -- they already bring their fans with them.

This is a bit old, but still pretty accurate -- I published a step-by-step guide to do what breadpig does, so anyone can replicate it, because that's how we roll.

[http://breadpig.com/blogs/news/5863073-reasons-to-self- publi...](http://breadpig.com/blogs/news/5863073-reasons-to-self-publish-or- start-your-own-niche-publishing-company-or-not) [http://breadpig.com/blogs/news/5863065-step-by-step-guide- on...](http://breadpig.com/blogs/news/5863065-step-by-step-guide-on-how-to- publish-a-book)

Sorry for the mega post but I know how much work Christina (runs breadpig ops) put into pulling this off and I feel like an article that doesn't even mention that isn't doing it justice. Obviously the story here is Ryan, which made this amazing thing possible, and he deserves 99.9% of the credit for the product and campaign, but it's not quite as simple as "self-published."

*We paid for printing up-front with xkcd's book and a couple of SMBC's, but thankfully kickstarter came along and we've since adapted the business because we now have the pre-order dollars from backers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Something I didn't realize until now: "Choose Your Own Adventure" is an actual series/brand, not just a genre:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure)

<comment> mh- Indeed, there are over 200 of them - I read most of them as a kid, at least all of the ones available in our local library.

<comment><USER2> And it's under copyright, so we have to call them Adventures-of-your-own- choosing ;)

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weiner/trial-of-the- clon...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weiner/trial-of-the-clone-a- choosable-path-gamebook-by-za)

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weiner/trial-of-the- clon...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weiner/trial-of-the- clone-2-wrath-of-the-pacifist)

<comment><USER5> The problem here is actually trademark law not copyright. The idea behind trademarks is that customers know the source of the product, so names, logos, brands, etc. are protected by it.

Copyright only protects the actual content/expression of the work of the Choose Your Own Adventure, not the name of the series.

Stallman has a nice article about the conflation of the "intellectual property" laws here: [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not- ipr.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article asks

> Is it a good book? Is it $580,905 good?

The point it misses, I think, is that it doesn't have to be "$580,905 good". It just has to be $15 or $20 good to each independent backer. If I put up $20 to get a physical copy, then the worth of _my_ copy has absolutely nothing to do with everyone else's copy.

This is, of course, the "work smarter, not harder" concept proven.

Contracting, consulting, and anything else where our time is the product on sale is a low return product. We can't create more time to increase our returns.

Instead we need to find our own "Hamlet" that for some finite effort on our part we can be rewarded by tens, hundreds or even thousands of customers. All of whom receive the value they pay for and all of whom have no interest in every other customer and whether our effort (time) is worth the total we've been paid by all customers.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I thought that was an odd way to phrase it as well. Undertones of "well, it's not _real_ literature" levied against science fiction, fantasy, pulp, and most anything not written by people long dead somewhere in there as well.

</comment></comment><comment> barry-cotter Good, thoughtful article but I fail to see how Shakespeare's legacy is "perverted" by Ryan North's project. The original is stilo there, pristine as ever.

</comment><comment><USER7> I just received the book, and it is impressive! Good paper, beautifully printed, great illustrations, not to mention absolutely hilarious. Definitely exceeded my expectations.

<comment><USER2> That's exactly how Ryan North rolls, that magical Canadian....</comment></comment>


Yahoo Hires McKinsey to Mull Reorg, as Mayer Demands Exec Pledge to Stay - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2015/11/09/yahoo-hires-mckinsey-to-mull-reorg-as-mayer-demands-exec-pledge-to-stay/ <comment><USER2> The carousel ride is over and investors are out of nickels for little Marissa

It has been three years and she still has no idea what she's doing. It goes to show you that Google/Stanford pedigree and a pretty face doesn't necessarily make for a great CEO.

Now they're bringing in the big boys to clean up the mess and make the decisions she couldn't (doesn't want to) make.

<comment><USER3> This is just bile. Please don't post comments like this to HN.

<comment><USER2> I agree. Seemed funny and clever at the time.

<comment><USER3> That's a fine observation on your part, exactly the kind of thing we all need to do to preserve civility here.

It sounds trivial, but isn't, so thank you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fake NSA source code leaks - <AUTHOR>

Typically the register, with screaming heading http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/25/nsa_source_code_release/
->  NiFi is the name of this NSA sponsored project http://incubator.apache.org/projects/nifi.html <comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/25/nsa_source_code_rele...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/25/nsa_source_code_release/)

[http://incubator.apache.org/projects/nifi.html](http://incubator.apache.org/projects/nifi.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Which post on Indie hacker is your favourite and why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> My all time favorite is Storemapper

[https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/storemapper](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/storemapper)

Here's Why

> But I built the first version of Storemapper from nothing to live-and- > accepting-payments in one 30-hour flight

He launched his MVP within 3 days.

> I charged for Storemapper from the beginning (just $5/month) and gradually > raised prices and added plan tiers over time. The first 5 customers came > from just emailing every client I ever had about Storemapper.

Instantly validated MVP by charging from the beginning, and by getting PAYING customers from Day 1.

> I never put any money into Storemapper. It was cashflow positive the entire > time, mostly because I stacked my SaaS business on top of a lot of other > SaaS products that typically had a free or very cheap starting tier, so > costs grew linearly with revenue

Most of all, this. Didn't sink money into the idea hoping it would click. Instead, saw a need, built the MVP in 3 days, launched it, started charging from day 1, and got paying customers from day 1.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like somebody wants to obtain SEO links.</comment>


A Look Inside AOL's Platform Strategy; My Conversation with Userplane's CEO - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2007/11/05/aol-platform/ "AOL may not be totally clueless after all. " <comment><USER2> AOL has a strategy?

<comment><USER3> Not really. Their general strategy right now is to reduce costs since the money coming in is lower than expected and dropping.

Userplanes is an example of a product that sounds great, could have been great, and then was crippled, underused and never delivered what it could have.

But isn't it interesting to see such a giant fall? I really think they are an example of a company that could not handle a disruptive innovation.</comment></comment>


Understand the JavaScript SEO basics - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/javascript-seo-basics <comment><USER2> SEO consultant here (yeah, yeah).

Please, still in 2019, be careful with JavaScript unless you're willing to deal with a lot of uncertainty.

Google routinely says how things are _supposed_ to work, but there are plenty of examples where their crawlers act inconsistent to public statements. To be clear, probably not Googlebot's fault though; we as a species do a lot of weird things when building websites.

Just finished a big project with a client who had a client-side render of their react app for the customer facing website. Googlebot was VERY sporadic with how they were indexing certain parts of the site, and in general, the site lost out to inferior sites in more competitive SERPs. Server side render fixed a lot of this and rankings/traffic jumped.

It's also worth noting that the Bing/Yahoo crawlers (still a notable chunk of web traffic!) can't crawl JS. You can ignore this chunk of market share if you want but someone is going to happily take it.

As a general rule, my advice is always this: Make it as easy as possible for bots to crawl and index your site's content. The more hoops the crawler is jumping through, the worse your site will perform in search engines.

<comment><USER3> > Server side render fixed a lot of this and rankings/traffic jumped.

Good, they should just delist client side rendered web pages.

<comment><USER4> Why? I enjoy writing client-side SPAs, and I can pump out a better UI/UX must faster than I could otherwise.

My users don't care how I build it, just that the site works and is enjoyable to use.

If I need server-side rendering I'll still write it with a client-side rendered (e.g. React), but tack on server-side rendering at the end.

<comment><USER5> I like to build my websites in COBOL but the browsers won't support it even though I'm more productive.

You are not building this for yourself if you need to be indexed by google. You need to build in a supported way.

The bigger question is why you think an spa should rank well in general. It's only one page.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I agree - server side rendering is likely better for SEO in most scenarios, and so I should consider it in a business context where SEO is essential.

This isn't everyone.

The comment I replied to said that Google should "delist client side rendered web pages", which is a terrible idea. Maybe I'm OK with the SEO hit? Maybe I've architectured my SPA so that it _can_ be indexed? (At least to some degree)

> The bigger question is why you think an spa should rank well in general. > It's only one page.

SPAs can have multiple pages (despite the name). Check out react-router [0]. Browser history can be manipulated to give the same "back button/forward button" functionality between logical pages. This is done for you by whatever framework you use.

For my use case, having the browser reload every time a page is changed would severely interrupt UX.

[0] [https://reacttraining.com/react-router/web/guides/quick- star...](https://reacttraining.com/react-router/web/guides/quick-start)

<comment><USER6> But to a crawler it's one "page". To humans it's different, but not to robot. Crawler still (mostly) "page" == GET

<comment><USER7> Yet here we are discussing TFA that says otherwise, and crawlers are only going to be become better at it.

This is a beautiful part of the new web: indexable applications.

<comment><USER5> Crawlers were suppose to have this down in 2012 (at least google),now they recommend a sitemap page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I echo what others like @sharkweek are saying - Google has been saying that they index JavaScript for quite a while now. At I/O 2019 they said the crawler should be on the latest Chromium codebase that supports all modern JavaScript features. I built some test cases [0] to see if this is true, and just couldn't get Google to index content inserted via JavaScript. For example, scroll down to the Popover button test case.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong? Open to feedback. Opensourced code is here [1].

[0][https://shan.io/will-it-index/](https://shan.io/will-it-index/)

[1][https://github.com/rayshan/rayshan.github.io/tree/master/wil...](https://github.com/rayshan/rayshan.github.io/tree/master/will- it-index)

<comment><USER9> I can confirm that they _do not parse low ranking JavaScript sites_ , but they will parse higher ranking JavaScript sites.

Bots aside (Twitter and Slack still don't parse JS), it is still in your best interest to server-side render or pre-render a JavaScript site. The time-to- first-paint difference always starts small, but as you add features the JS apps become so bloated you'd be better off starting over with a server-side rendered HTML app.

(I am the creator of [https://www.prerender.cloud/](https://www.prerender.cloud/))

<comment><USER8> Thank you! Good point about bots not parsing JavaScript. I find it increasingly important to build and test structured data so users sharing the content within these walled gardens will have a good experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For those here to find out how relevant server rendering is for SPAs in light of this, I think the answer is still very much 'better if you do'.

Some relevant excerpts from the article (emphasis mine):

> Keep in mind that server-side or pre-rendering is still a great idea because > _it makes your website faster_ for users _and crawlers_ , and not all bots > can run JavaScript.

> _Once Googlebot 's resources allow_, a headless Chromium renders the page > and executes the JavaScript.

So, there are still no specifics on what extra delays might be involved, but this seems to suggest what I've heard about JS-rendered content still taking much longer than static content to update in the index (i.e. days to weeks) might indeed be the case.

I.e. seems they are implying that while this _works_ , static content is still preferred by them and takes priority.

</comment><comment><USER11> This feels like such a smoke and mirrors thing. This gem:

 _Write compatible code

Browsers offer many APIs and JavaScript is a quickly-evolving language. Googlebot has some limitations regarding which APIs and JavaScript features it supports. To make sure your code is compatible with Googlebot, follow our guidelines for troubleshooting JavaScript problems._

Leads to this page:

[https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/fix- search-...](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/fix-search- javascript)

Which says absolutely nothing. It details nothing about what is supported.

Utterly useless. No version of HTML running, no info about what gets run, no actual technical details at all.

</comment><comment><USER12> Perhaps the biggest gotcha was that Googlebot was running Chromium that was years old and required polyfills that you wouldn't otherwise include anymore. Since May they run a recent Chromium though: "The new evergreen Googlebot" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20482235](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20482235)

</comment><comment><USER13> Search Engine Optimization? More like Googlebot Optimization, I think.

<comment><USER14> When 95%+ of search traffic comes from Google, these two things are the same thing.

<comment><USER15> Isn't that his point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A little off-topic, but one of the most exciting things in my mind about Phoenix LiveView [1] is that you can get some dynamic web applications and not have to navigate this JS-rendering minefield. When a LiveView page is request, the server sends over the _full page_ as just static HTML. The JS half of LiveView then upgrades to a websocket connection, and your page becomes dynamic.

Not a good fit for everything, but it's great if you want to add some fancy form validation to, say, your landing page. You can render whatever you want with LiveView, get your fancy dynamic stuff, without having to worry about making your page more indexable.

[1]: [https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view](https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view)

<comment><USER17> 1) huge elixir/phoenix fan, glad to see you promoting this here

2) but I'm really here to commend your comment on this now-flagged post that I now cannot respond to: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20500181](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20500181) . I don't know if HN mods understand the irony in deplatforming a post arguing against deplatforming, but I am 100% in agreement with you there.

<comment><USER16> 1) :)

2) Thank you! Is it really flagged? That's too bad. And funny, in a sad way.

<comment><USER17> It got unflagged. ??? (Sorry for OT)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I use middleware on my SPA's static server that sends bots a lite SSR version of the page that gets SEO'd up pretty well. Best of both worlds

<comment><USER19> Showing the bot something different than the user could be seen as cloaking. We also do that in some cases. Just be really carefull with that strategy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is this the first confirmation from Google that they render JS/SPAs? I've heard rumors before...

<comment><USER21> You can see the results in 'fetch as Google' and in the structured data tool. Injected JS content is there, including changes to the page title and head.

As always take SEO advice from Google with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER22> > As always take SEO advice from Google with a grain of salt.

Why?

<comment><USER23> Well, is SEO advice just allows you to get rid of any impediments from rising to where you should in the results then you should trust them, but if SEO advice is a thing that can help you rise to a prominence that you should not have then that advice would be detrimental to Google and they would not give it to you.

So really it matters if you believe in the light or dark sides of the SEO force.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A good search engine shouldn't process JS at all, and index only the content that is reachable via links pulled from HTML (which may, of course, be dynamic).

The processing of JS explains a lot of the sheer garbage that is in the Google results.

I think they do it because it ties into their business model. JS is needed to unearth the kind of crap that a certain segment of the user base is looking for. That certain segment is worth catering to because it consists of users who are likely to click on ads.

Otherwise, nobody in their right mind would integrate JS into a crawler. "I'm going to write a program that automatically finds random source code, much of it malicious, and runs it!" Come on; without a business agenda justifying it, it's a complete non-starter.

<comment><USER25> This is so out-of-touch with the modern web. Lots of totally legitimate websites, including major news outlets and Wikipedia, render their web pages on the client using JavaScript. Whether or not this is a good thing is a separate issue (personally I see nothing wrong with it), but it should be obvious that a useful search engine in 2019 needs to be able to index JavaScript-rendered content.

<comment><USER24> I just noticed I haven't been allowing any JS whatsoever from Wikipedia. Everything looks fine. I'm logged in and can edit, etc. (I fixed that now; all allowed).

But that's not my point; how did we go from "search _engines_ shouldn't execute JS" to "you're out of touch if you think you can use the web without JS".

<comment><USER26> I guess the assumption was that search engines should be able to access the web, like humans do.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The end of social - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/12/the-end-of-social.html <comment><USER2> Increasingly I see the most important role online to be that of the editor. I already have far too much information to deal with. The one service I'm willing to pay real money for at this point is the one that finds only the very most interesting bits for me. So far this role has really only been served for me by a handful of genuine friends.

<comment><USER3> That's precisely why while everyone is predicting the death of traditional publishing houses, I predict that they'll continue to flourish (though in a slightly transformed state) even with ebooks supposedly leveling the playing field. In an era where everyone and their grandma can sell their ebook on Amazon, you need a respected publisher (or "editor" as you put it) to sort through the coal and present you only with the gems.

This is a role that traditional publishers actively do today!

<comment><USER4> I disagree. That's what "people who bought this book also bought that book" is for.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, also bloggers. Reading books and then writing reviews is the kind of thing people will do for fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those interested, a tangentially related article, "Faux Friendship"[1] by Willian Deresiewicz, is one of my all-time-favourite online articles, which I urge everyone to read.

It's long, but worth it.

[1]: <http://chronicle.com/article/Faux-Friendship/49308/>

<comment><USER7> This article is spot on! Brilliant stuff! Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I couldn't agree with this article more. Due to the awkwardness around not accepting a friend invite, my Facebook consists of just about everyone I've ever known in my life. It is convenient to have an easy channel to track someone down if you need to talk to them but the wall has become completely unusable to me. The combination of 1) having too many people that I don't have real relationships with on Facebook 2) many of my _friends_ ' postings of very low value things (ex. I'm eating an apple right now) 3) the increased usage of auto-updates (ex. I'm listening to 'Rihanna'), Facebook has turned into a wasteland of posts where about 1 / 500 updates are actually useful to me and finding that 1 is no longer worth it. I know the natural response to this is that I should be organizing my friends better but I'm not sure that this is a solution, because I have certain friends that will post 'low value' updates and then post something very 'high value' (value meaning somehow interesting to me). So the first problem for Facebook is trying to figure out how to cherry pick the good posts to show me and this in itself is incredibly difficult. But the problem gets exponentially harder as I add more friends (which will continue to happen to avoid awkward moments in the real world) assuming that I only have time to read X number of updates. In other words if on average every friend has 1 / 100 high value updates, the chance of Facebook getting it right and getting that high value update into the 100 updates I read every day gets lower as I add more friends and there is more noise to filter. It seems to me that there may be a bell curve to the usefulness of Facebook based on your friend count - in the beginning it is marginally useful when you only have a few friends, it becomes very useful when you have some magical conservative number of friends and then it becomes again marginally useful as your friend count gets very high. The problem is that keeping your friend count at that magical number and not progressing past that is very difficult.

</comment><comment><USER9> Two relevant papers (a few links away from the oreilly.com article)

<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1826825>

<http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/DAED_a_00114>

</comment><comment><USER10> Social streaming creates white noise, while curated social sharing provides meaning. Having the devices in a hundred friends' pockets passively alert their social profile that they ate at a burger joint is meaningless. Having my friend tweet a photo of the mouthwatering burger she ate at the Umami Burger in my neighborhood at least provides some level of ambient value.

I listen to a lot of new music. My Spotify account is linked to Facebook. Seeing an automatically posted list of the last 70 songs I listened to might be interesting to a stalker, but having me specifically post "Bah, the new Weeknd mixtape isn't nearly as good as House of Balloons" actually tells you something about my taste.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm going to disagree here. One important distinction with automated sharing is that it is being displayed in a sidebar, outside the main feed. It isn't just adding spam. It is allowing you to dive deeper, see some details that maybe your friends wouldn't have thought to share with you but maybe you would have been interested to know anyway. If you are in a hurry and just want the big events of the day you won't read it. But if you are just relaxing with nothing to do or feel like reading something a little different maybe you will learn something new about one of your friends.

In the same way that facebook let people 'send emails' that didn't have to be read, these sidebar updates allow you to 'post statuses' that don't have to be looked at. It is adding a new priority level to communication. Kind of like the background music in a coffeeshop, you wouldn't say you go there just for the music, but you definitely appreciate the ambiance and the music is something that adds up to make that experience.

<comment><USER12> _It is adding a new priority level to communication._

The 'this doesn't matter' priority?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd like to see the end of the use of the word "social" as an uncountable noun.

</comment><comment><USER14> He actually means the "end of Facebook". There will be other social services to take its place, just like Facebook took the place of Myspace. Those services probably already exist, just like Facebook existed years before Myspace even started to lose users.

</comment><comment><USER15> I agree, it will definitely be the doom of Facebook or any other social network if it does not let users easily differentiate between sharing and faux-sharing. It will be like an email account that can't filter out spam.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra I wonder why people write their opinions on facebook music experience sharing without mentioning that last.fm already solved this problem at least once and the solution was a meaningful product that worked for some people. In this context, reading claims like "a constant pipeline of what's queued up in Spotify, it all becomes meaningless" make me laugh. People figured it out and it wasn't meaningless.

If they don't know about last.fm, why do they bother? They obviously don't care about music very much.

<comment><USER16> The whole point of Last.fm is that you get stats on your listening habits (and those of your friends). The realtime thing is just how the system collects the stats. Besides, even there, my friends' "Now playing" stuff in never bigger than a small icon on the side. It's not the core of the site.

Facebook, with Spotify, gives you the useless part (the "Now playing") without the good part (the advanced stats, recommandations, music compatibility, etc)

<comment> guard-of-terra That's the fact any seamless sharing reviewer should mention.

Others have figured out, the world doesn't end with facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I agree that lots of random sharing data can be useless, but I think it is only useless in its current form. There is a great deal of data to be intelligently mined there.

For example, I wish Facebook told me aggregate info, like 12 of my friends are reading X book, and 15 listen to Y song, and 5 have liked Z restaurant. To me this is a lot more compelling as I can see real trends in what my social circle is consuming.

</comment><comment><USER18> In other words, automated "now playing" scripts are as annoying and useless on social media as they were on irc and and instant messengers.

</comment><comment><USER19> Interesting article, and as a forty-year-old who doesn't use facebook, it makes sense to me.

But I wonder whether 20 year-olds who have been immersed in this kind of thing for 3-4 years would agree. And what today's 13-year-olds will think then _they_ are 20, and this has been a part of their entire post-childhood..

<comment><USER20> Well, as a nineteen-year old (quite soon to be 20) I can say that I don't care much for the Facebook ticker (the "share everything" list), nor do my friends seem to.

I agree with this article, but I may not represent the "average" Facebook- visitor, considering I barely read my friends updates, create updates of my own or play Facebook-games. (I visit for two groups which I participate actively in)

Sharing everything takes the value out of it, and I think most people, 20-year olds or not, would agree. Perhaps that's why I've stopped checking what my friends are saying, my interests are already way too specialised for me to have any interest in what they blast out to everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Good piece. It is not far off from the things people like danah boyd have been saying. The exchange of personal information is a unit of social currency. If you treat it like it has no value, then it becomes of no value. Editorial effort, on the other hand, both adds value and also signals value.

</comment><comment><USER22> This has been posted by andygeers 5 days ago.

/item?id=3315065

It's currently on page 7 of the top.

</comment><comment><USER23> Writing a letter, is much more personal than sending email or texting. It means you've taken time out of your day to sit down, plan out your thoughts, put them in a package and pay to have it shipped to someone personally.

Or how a cheap, thoughtful gift means more than a $100 bill at Christmas.

It's the effort, the thought, that really counts.</comment>


How Software Companies Die (1995) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://homepages.uc.edu/~thomam/Articles/HowSoftwareCompaniesDie.pdf <comment><USER2> It's amazing how relevant these still are, despite so much change in the industry...</comment>


I Resent You – An Open Letter to Shanley Kane - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/building-gittip/i-resent-you-a6beb5ce19d6 <comment><USER2> This whole thing leaves me feeling like I just watched a dog get kicked for bringing the wrong color tennis ball to its owner.

Chad seems to have made a fundamental category error: he thought he was dealing with a person who wanted to have a reasonable, productive discussion. In reality, he was dealing with a vicious bully who wanted to hurt him.

This Shanley person sounds like she has a lot of anger. Maybe it's justified. Maybe someone did something terrible to her, and this horrific persona is a logical defense mechanism. But I feel like it probably wasn't Chad's fault.

<comment><USER3> > he was dealing with a vicious bully

Really? Posting on twitter and github doesn't make you a vicious bully. Chad's whole post seems super defensive and unprofessional, which is typical when you point out the privilege of the privileged.

<comment><USER4> Actually a common thread through much of the discussion about transparency/publicity/safety is that someone engaging on social media should be aware of their platform's effect on the people they talk to. I think that's a pretty good point really. In the case of many of the activists mentioned, it means the amplification of the threats to their safety. In a different situation, it might mean the ability to easily get someone fired.

Having a large audience / lots of followers is a powerful thing. Maybe it isn't vicious in the sense that it isn't violent, but I think it can definitely be a way to bully.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm only going to make one comment on this thread:

If you use this thread to make disparaging comments about Shanley, you're missing the point and you're doing it wrong. Go look at how respectfully I tried to treat Shanley when she gave me tons of crap, and then go do the same thing. Shanley's abuse does not make your abuse okay.

Let's all be kind to each other! :D

<comment><USER6> You made this "open letter" knowing it's a lightning rod to abuse her. Since that was a predictable outcome of your action, you share responsibility in abuse.

I resent you leading abuse against her, especially when we give you our money... to give to decent people.

I resent you piling onto her (ironically from Medium) while her account is protected due to other attacks.

I resent your "need" to do so PUBLICLY to someone who suffers threats of violence for fundamentally improving the world. Your reason: "because my resentment is my problem, and I need to express it to you".

I resent you THANKING people who call your top users (like her) "professional victims" \-- yet you "resent" it when important criticism is turned onto you.

<comment><USER7> This seems entirely unfair. She publicly and viscously attacked him for not running his company (which paid her) in a way that best suited his interests.

When he responds with "You hurt my feelings when you did X" he is piling on and contributing to her abuse? Her attitude would've hurt my feelings. There seem to be no acceptable avenues through which to attempt any sort of conflict resolution with Shanley. White men are just expected to be silent and let her disparage any work they do that doesn't meet her world view.

Thank you Chad, for making the world a better place with your work. I disagreed with how you implicitly supported a sexist comment on HackerNews but I think that is a forgivable offense and that the good you do with Gittip far outweighs the negative of that action.

<comment><AUTHOR> What sexist comment did Chad make?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel really bad for Chad. I agree with @didgeoridoo that it feels like I just watched a dog get kicked.

He's on a quixotic quest toward a certain kind of world, with openness and transparency. Unfortunately when he tries to interface with the rest of the world it can often go horribly wrong. His general attempts at embracing those who disagree with him, eg by thanking them and retweeting, exacerbate and lend weight to unpleasant comments.

It's truly unfortunate that Chad didn't manage to support the diversity activist community in a way that was acceptable to them. I think fundamentally there missions are much more similar that they're acknowledging now, and each is loosing out on what could potentially be a great ally.

I hope in the future these sort of things can be more constructively handled on both sides that either has so far.

</comment><comment><USER9> I guess I'm a little unclear on why anyone would bother engaging with shanley in the first place. Her twitter feed, while frequently entertaining, screams "professional bullshitter" pretty loudly. It's reasonable to assume that her primary motive is to drive traffic to her website. I suppose it's also possible that she's just a truly damaged person -- or maybe some combination of both.

Either way, it seems like there are better ways to expend your energies. In the end, outside her relatively small circle of fellow cottage-industrialist diversity activists, shanley is a pretty insignificant presence in the wider world of tech and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for posting this. I feel the discussion around this topic has become particularly vitriolic; it's nice seeing individuals attempt to recenter the dialog on dialog.

<comment><USER10> Edit: Well, at least I hope we're trying to dialog about this, our community needs it. I can't believe some of the stuff I'm seeing on Twitter right now: can we please just admit there's an issue here, and work together to resolve it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anybody have a running total of how many people this person has abused or even gotten fired?

</comment><comment><USER12> Shanley is a perpetual victim who lashes out at everyone and everything around her.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hahahah the author of this sounds like a shitbag.

Closed my gittip account. Sniff, I had fun growing my very own company ;_;.</comment>


Will humans write code in 2040? - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.00676 <comment><USER2> I mostly get downvoted for questioning the AI hype, but I never tried it here in HN.

The paper is... how I put it mildly... not in the realm of making sense.

They mention simple question answering (which still stumbles at more complex even if structured questions), then code generators that existed since 1980s (at least) and then pretend that it's the same.

Today's AI is about approximating human judgment from datasets. The knowledge representation part, which is essential for tasks like coding, did not advance much since a decade ago.

This statement, however, takes the cake:

> Some early results from Facebook this year suggest that machines are capable > of developing their own more efficient methods of communications

It's about the hype created by technically illiterate journos. (My TechCrunch piece on that: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/06/the-secret-language-of- cha...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/06/the-secret-language-of-chatbots/)) Could the authors have done some minimal due diligence before making this kind of claims?

Re subject, if anything, coding today requires much higher level of abstract thinking. Of course, there are tools for coding oompah loompahs too, like WordPress, but there is a lot of human decisions to be made there, too.

<comment><USER3> I think it is not about AI but about improving our work with new tools. There are zillion developers doing the same thing everyday with the same mistakes and a lot of this work can be encapsulated at different abstraction levels.

<comment><USER4> I agree, the level of abstractions will just change. We might end up writing something more like formal logic in a declarative language and the AI will then implement and optimise it.

Kind of the way a compiler generates optimised machine code from our higher level languages now.

<comment><USER5> Also don't forget - we still have to write certain routines in Assembly even after so many years. Number of abstraction layers doesn't mean complete automation.

<comment><USER6> Going from high level to low level code will not go away. But, for the most part you would probably try to get something working and then optimize it. [http://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization](http://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think they will and the paper is too naive when assuming the techniques can scale and that computers can do the translation from a vague list of requirements to a precise specification. This comic[1] explains the issue well I think. There is a lot of hot new research going on in program synthesis, most of the stuff I see is about either of:

\- Programming by example where we give some example inputs and outputs and let the machine synthesize a program generalizing the input-output function. It works well for small, pure mathematical functions with not so many subtle edge cases but I don't think we can make it work for the edge cases as easily, at least without human intervention that will be analogous to programming the synthesizer.

\- Synthesis from specification, we give a tight spec of the function we want and all the available functions then ask the computer to synthesize the program. Some researchers made some very cool examples of this work by e.g. taking specifications encoded with dependent types and generating conforming programs. The catch here is that, if the spec is not precise enough, you may end up with a non-conforming function and who is going to write such a precise spec? The programmer!

[1]: [http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very- comprehensiv...](http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very- comprehensive-and-precise-spec/)?

</comment><comment><USER8> Turns out, machines already do write most or really all of the "code" and we use higher level more human-like languages to tell magic programs what code to generate. Those magic programs are called compilers and interpreters, and they already do a lot to protect humans from the extreme heterogeneity of hardware.

<comment><USER9> There has been research going back to the very early stages of ML to apply it to compiler heuristics. For example, applying decision trees to loop unrolling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The idea seems a bit outlandish, but I could easily see many coding jobs vanish. We wrote a performance-oriented library (a regex matcher) and invested huge numbers of person-hours tweaking and tuning and building new, faster subsystems. It's not a giant leap of faith to imagine a 'Gold' version (correct but not fast) being written by a human and most of the tuning/tweaking/test generation/etc being automated.

I doubt that there is a simple AI approach to generate significant programs out of thin air, but I suspect a lot of the mechanical work of making programs fast/robust/small/whatever could be automated.

Sounds like a fun startup, honestly.

<comment><USER11> Sounds a lot like a compiler.

<comment><USER10> Hah. It's a fair cop.

That being said, the system I had in my mind was considerably more elaborate and extensive than you would expect from a compiler, except if your -O flags were numerically open-ended (-O99, anyone?).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Fundamentally, I see programming as the task of describing what a computer should to. The way we create these instructions have definitely changed during the past 20 years, especially with the large open source movement and stuff like pip and npm. We have higher levels of abstraction now, the LEGO blocks we assemble are larger and more reusable.

In my experience it feels like most of the low hanging fruits, when it comes to abstractions, already have been picked. The databases, ORMs, web servers, UI-frameworks, parsers/encoders, crypto stuff etc. are all pre-built LEGO pieces I use and connect with each other. And it feels like the connection part is my main job.

I would predict that we code mostly in the same way in 2040 as we do now, with the approximately same level of abstraction, but with much better tooling. I want an AI that can continuously read my code as I write it and tell me when I've done a stupid misstake and turned the LEGO block the wrong way.

Also isn't a main problem of professional software development to understand what another human wants me to instruct the computer to do? If my project leader / customer can't manage to instruct another human on how the program should work, can we expect an AI to do better? Of course, the AI can respond quicker on Slack, and ask questions based on knowledge it has from previous projects and have sane defaults based on experience, but still. I'm sceptical.

<comment><USER13> > The databases, ORMs, web servers, UI-frameworks, parsers/encoders, crypto > stuff etc. are all pre-built LEGO pieces I use and connect with each other.

Keep in mind there is far more programming than Web programming in the world. It's important to keep that perspective when ruminating on programming at large, and based on the pieces you mentioned, it sounds like you're limiting yourself to that mindset. (That's OK.)

<comment><USER12> Yeah, of course. It's what I do mostly these days. As mentioned in other threads, some people still work at much lower abstraction level, and even hand optimise stuff that is really critical and can't be left to a stupid compiler.

But isn't the trend with larger (/ "more useful") abstractions spreading even outside the sphere of web stuff? I'm thinking about stuff like game engines, ML frameworks or all the standard libraries for mobile plattforms.

I would really like to know how the life of a network card firmware developer is like, or writing drivers for graphics cards, or software in highly reliable systems like cars or something. I guess their work is quite different from mine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are already many layers of hardware/software that we don't have to code to use even going into the OSI layers stack. However the top most layer will always require programming and architecture because that is where innovation that matters to humans resides.

Even machine learning, big data, artificial intelligence, language processing and more all take some initial design and goals i.e. you have to train machine learning and architect what it is used for.

AI/automation/generation are currently great at reproduction but not inception/prototyping/creative aspects of development. There are areas that constantly move into automated layers though, where machine code is better. For instance, optimizations like WebAssembly are forming to solidify the application layers standards/platforms that may not need to be done by humans much longer, just as assembly wasn't used as much directly by programmers once C/C++/Objective-C came along in that wave in the 80s. When layers are standardized and automated, programmers just move up the stack to the new blue ocean of development built on top of everything else.

Similarly to AI, people have been saying visual coding will take over actual coding for a long time, same with automation/generation/AI. The automation still takes architecture, choreography, creativity and innovation to come up with something. Coding is automation once it is developed and live. Coding is part of the takeover and there will always be a top most layer that AI can't do for some time and possibly never on the creativity side for things that matter to a human or market need.

Programmers are also the first to really take advantage of AI. I am hoping for a future where small teams or individuals can build AI armies that code like they want on a massive scale. Here's to coding for your bot army that will do your bidding in the future and make a small team competitive always through the help of automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER15> Programmers have been trying to make programmers redundant for as long as our industry has existed but made very little progress in doing so, none if you don't count productivity improvements.

I'm yet to see a codeless platform that can handle anything more complicated than a sick leave form.

</comment><comment><USER16> Feels like one of those particular/general cases. In particular, few people routinely code in assembler any more. I imagine you can do degree-level courses in "computing" which don't even go there. I know you can do courses with no VLSI or microelectronics, both of which were required subjects on many courses at one point.

So yes, in particular terms, we don't do things which machines (programming language compilers, VHDL->VLSI compilers) can do better.

But "general" case, no. we still "do" these things. They're just specialized.

So particular case, will everyone write code in imperative languages? No. But general-case, yes, people will still write programs.

"Siri, I've lost my wallet: ask Roomba to sweep the floor one time, exhaustively, and see if its stuck under a piece of furniture" is, at one remove "code"

<comment><USER17> One thing I can see happening is assisted UI design for websites. A lot of manpower today is spent going from PSDs or wireframes to HTML/CSS.

It's quite feasible to give a sketch, with some style transfer have an AI output decent HTML and even some scaffolding for your JS framework of choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> In the future humans won't have write code because machines will do it all.

So all that will be left for humans is set up configs like webpack. This will take a tremendous amount of time and effort. So there will be a huge demand for configers. And thus configer bootcamps and Medium articles on how there is so much sexism in the configing industry and others bemoning the prevelence of config-bros.

Sarcasm aside, at the end of the day someone has to tell a machine what is wanted. Unless machines get much smarter and they aren't about to get that smart any time soon near as I can tell. Those someones are called programmers.

</comment><comment><USER19> _that machines, instead of humans, will write most of their own code by 2040_

Regardless of whether it actually happens, a future where humans can no longer have meaningfully detailed control over what machines do (to them), sounds extremely dystopian and certainly much sci-fi has been based on that vision, so I hope it _doesn 't_ happen...

<comment><USER17> This already happens. Compilers and interpreters hide most of the details.

Unless you're writing embedded code you usually don't have a say in a lot of what's going on. Things like memory allocation, scheduling, interrupts, addressing.

Things like kubernetes takes this even further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> That AI would ask the client / designer "what the hell do you mean with this?" until an implementable design emerges. Client / designer decides it's much more efficient to throw a half baked idea over the fence to blame a human programmer afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER21> If you're on a phone, here's an HTML version of the article: [https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1712.00676/](https://www.arxiv- vanity.com/papers/1712.00676/)

</comment><comment><USER22> The more I think of this, the more the only counter-argument seems to be natural language not being precise enough. But all coding tasks start with a natural language description at one point. Hmmm.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think Humans will be writing code 40 years from now but not as they do today as natural language processing will get far enough that you could tell an AI what you require and then it will write the code for you. When a tech advances the number of its users increases but the % that understand its internals drop. Programming is no special flake to be protected from it the same will happen to it. We are already getting small hints of this with specialized algorithms that optimize code or find bugs

<comment><USER24> Citation needed. Decades ago human level AI was coming real soon now and cobol would let managers write code without needing programmers.

Are you specifically asserting that the need to write code will be obviated by human or greater AI? This seems to be a safe prediction in the long run although I cannot imagine how we could accurately establish a time line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yes. Technological progress is almost always slower than people imagine.

</comment><comment><USER26> Nice counterexample to Betteridge's law.

</comment><comment><USER27> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER28> it's called prolog

<comment><USER29> its closer. in the end I think its too fussy. what do you think of the datalog inspired languages?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> In the end, the only remaining jobs will be those that require interacting with other humans.

<comment><USER31> What current jobs don't require interaction with other humans?

<comment><USER30> Well, better phrased: that MOSTLY require the interaction with other humans.</comment></comment></comment>


All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/weekend-poem-all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/245251/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> John Markoff's _Machines of Loving Grace_ is another touchpoint to the Brautigan poem. The NY Times book review is worth looking at: [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/books/review/machines- of-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/books/review/machines-of-loving- grace-by-john- markoff.html?mabReward=CTM&moduleDetail=recommendations-2&action=click&contentCollection=Science&region=Footer&module=WhatsNext&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&src=recg&pgtype=article). John's book is worth reading. Fred Turner's book, likewise, captures some of the ethos of the times and is, for me, filled with memories.</comment>


Show HN: HTML Server Components – web developer's life just got easier - <AUTHOR> http://ivopetkov.com/b/html-server-components/ <comment><USER2> Interesting.

It reminds a bit of the tag files of riot.js [1] Another possible approach (widely practiced today) is to have the children template extend the main template and override some blocks in the main template (you can do it with twig, blade etc). But even then, your templates could not be nested.

Nice concept!

[1] [http://muut.com/riotjs](http://muut.com/riotjs)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. It really looks a lot like React, RiotJS and WebCompoments (because they are all great) but it's on the server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In ASP.Net we call this user controls. We have this for like 15 years already.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you please give us an example user control where: 1\. you've got CSS and JS code that goes in the head tag of the result document 2\. you've got JS code that stays at the bottom of the body tag of the result document

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is stopping from styles from one components overwriting styles from another components. So in isolation, as you say, components work fine, but after processing, will it not break?

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently, there isn't an automatic solution. For now the component developer can use the component id (automatically generated if not specified) to separate styles. You can see such component at [https://github.com/ivopetkov/ivopetkov.github.io/blob/master...](https://github.com/ivopetkov/ivopetkov.github.io/blob/master/demos/html- server-components/components/body.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really cool. I'll have to remember to try this. What I really like is that you can use it today.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Email alerts enabled or disabled for new users? - <AUTHOR> Ask HN: Email alerts enabled or disabled (i.e. require opt-in) for new users?
Background: We run an API monitoring and analytics tool called Moesif that can send email/Slack notifications if we see something wrong with your API such as high error rates.
Currently, we do not send alerts to the customer unless they manually go to our "Alert Settings" panel and enable email alerts.
We could change it so that new users would automatically receive email alerts if something is wrong as soon as they integrate our SDK. Curious what developers on HN thinks about this for a good on boarding experience. Alerts was one of our most requested features so we just released them a few weeks ago, but we don't want to clutter people's email boxes if they don't want alerts. <comment><USER2> Disabled by default, but send a welcome email explaining to your users that they can enable this option to be alerted. For existing users, you can either send them an email or leave up a notification that they can close out, but read about those new changes. Depending on your app and if it is paid, you could also add in a text message feature, to be alerted.

Also give the option for a "per error" or "per error digest" and the digest will capture the last 10 errors and send them by email all at once. There could be some users who want to be alerted every time, but not giving them an option for anything else will make them not want to use it, so to at least be able to adjust the amount of emails is a far better option to get people actually using the feature.</comment>