The Future of Food Delivery [slides] - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1v9ifaW1Sxy_oVUtzn63BrqXKGcpMJ_eKrqb59BXjjXA/edit#slide=id.gd5b15f0a3_5_26 <comment><USER2> "Delivery Service Partner (DSP)"

I don't know why but i kept forgetting what that meant and seeing the acronym over and over bothered me. Future looks bright in this area, looking forward to seeing what happens

<comment><USER3> I keep thinking Digital Signals Processing Q__Q

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When do the DSPs start to vertically integrate - setting up their own dark mega kitchens, with generic styles like 'Pizza', 'Thai', 'Chinese', 'Indian'? These could appear as different restaurants, but in reality operate out of the same facility.

In this way the batching could be done even more efficiently, and orders would be coming from one mega-kitchen, with huge economies of scale.

<comment><USER5> That's what Deliveroo have set up in London. [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/oct/28/deliveroo-d...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/oct/28/deliveroo- dark-kitchens-pop-up-feeding-the-city-london)

Then you have new delivery-only brands such as Mac Shack – with the food being prepared in the kitchens of Bella Italia chain restaurants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used to live in Dublin until recently and coming from a country (Greece) where food/coffee delivery is free (apart from any tip), fast and ubiquitous, I was taken aback by the fact I had to pay a substantial delivery fee.

The upside was that driver safety seemed to be taken more seriously (it's a cutthroat business in Greece and drivers are pushed to their limit, accidents being rather frequent in their line of work).

<comment><USER7> How do the Greeks afford to include delivery cost in food prices, a business usually with minuscule margins?

How much does a cup of coffee cost if the price includes delivery?

And does every food item include enough cost to support delivery independently? How do they amortise the delivery costs across an order?

<comment><USER6> It's seen as part of the standard business expenses like utilities and rent. Of course it squeezes their profit margin but what can they do? Competition is fierce. What most joints do though is to require a minimum price per order to allow delivery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reading between the lines, the only real opportunity for a sustainable moat is the dark kitchens and order batching. This has been tried and failed a few times already, my guess is the secret ingredients are scale and marketing.

Delivery from traditional restaurants is just too low margin, historically it was done by only some types of restaurants at break-even or even a slight loss to increase demand, now that people are used to paying $6-10 premium, once the music stops and the VC money stops flowing, the restaurants that stay in business will easily adapt.

<comment><USER9> The tools required for a marketplace that connects people to existing restaurants and a "marketplace" that connects people to multiple "restaurants" that are in reality all from the same dark kitchen are pretty different. The former only requires staff, the latter requires real estate, equipment and product in addition to staff. It's essentially building a restaurant with a tech component, not building a tech product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Best shared content on HN in a long time. I love the thoughtfulness and thorough analysis of the winners and losers of each strategy.

</comment><comment><USER11> I skimmed through the slides and didn't see a single word allocated to the problem of the waste, pollution, and health effects generated by these services or any costs involved in managing them. Perhaps the figure of $365 billion is a convenient fiction, as is so often the case when modern young "entrepreneurs" see an opportunity to upend the underpinnings of society for profit.

Food isn't a problem we solve with megacorporations and apps and technology. Food isn't supposed to be optimized and analyzed and held to KPIs. Food is best when communities of people come together to participate and interact and nourish one another. All these services do is enslave and silo us away from each other so that the individual's essential needs for nutrition and community can become a profit stream in a corporation's ledger. They would build yet another layer in America's enormous neurosis around food. No thanks, Google.

<comment><USER12> That.

I'd like to see a future of food delivery which is less food delivery, more time to spend at home, more cooking and healthy choices.

But of course, as an endeavor whose main end goal is money, the future of food delivery has to be "more, more, more".

<comment><USER13> Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Food delivery is a good idea. Myself, I'd like to see _less_ time spent on cooking. Except few special cases, cooking is a chore for me, not pleasure.

What isn't a good idea is inherently unsustainable, VC-subsidized companies lobotomizing the industry in order to strip-mine it for value long enough to get flipped, leaving a shell of a market sector behind.

<comment><USER12> > _Let 's not throw the baby out with the bathwater._

If anything, I'd like to throw out more of the baby: e.g. people learning to grow their own fruits and vegetables, and make more of their own food, not just cooking.

<comment><USER13> Sure. I don't see why the two can't coexist.

It's also a matter of life stages. I know I want to have a vegetable garden of my own, either vertical in the city, or regular one in the country, depending on where I end up in the future. But today, I very much enjoy the ability to order a dinner or a pizza whenever my wife and I don't feel like cooking after a full day of work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is another instance where investors step in and ruin small businesses in an attempt to achieve a monopoly position by building a platform for an existing type of service.

As illustrated by the following snippets from the article:

> Restaurants are struggling to adapt as they are aggregated by DSPs

and

> No DSP has been able to prove consistent profitability with their existing > business model.

<comment><USER15> >> investors step in and ruin small businesses

Food delivery platforms will get centralized. If not by investors, By Amazon. By someone.

Why ? Because consumers want that. It's more convenient. And probably network effects apply here.

With food delivery centralized, Dark, big centralized kitchens will win over restaurants(for most popular meals). They're just cheaper. It's just specialization and higher volume.

Long term, making delivered food isn't a good place for a small business. And that'll happen with subsidies or without.

BTW: in the future, in most industries, a small business will only survive by making rare and unique things.

<comment><USER16> I'm not quite as pessimistic on the food delivery market as you are and would be interested to hear your/others' reactions.

>Food delivery platforms will get centralized. [...] Because consumers want that. It's more convenient. And probably network effects apply here.

I agree consumers want all restaurants in the same place. I'm less convinced that that implies platform consolidation because every party has incentives towards multi-tenanting to ensure access. Both restaurants and end customers have incentives towards multi-tenanting to reach each other and for a market- making DSP to demand exclusivity, they have to undermine the core thing both sides of the market want (access to supply/demand). A16Z has a good discussion of multi-tenanting as a limit to the economic value of network effects here [0].

> With food delivery centralized, Dark, big centralized kitchens will win over > restaurants(for most popular meals). They're just cheaper.

I agree there are cost efficiencies to dark kitchens and the delivery market is likely to trend that direction (cheaper real estate, leaner front of house, less decoration work, etc). It's not clear to me, though, that there are worthwhile economies of SCALE to be had here (at least in the core urban market), or that they're necessarily winning.

* Ingredients are low-margin, with prices dominated by transportation, so bargaining power over suppliers is limited.

* Delivery time matters. That's a small pro for large kitchens because you can more accurately forecast demand/staffing, but also a medium-sized con because 5 locations spread out in a city with 20 units of capacity each are more likely to be close to demand than 1 location with 100 units of capacity.

* Cooks aren't fungible, which makes it hard to capitalize on scale without consolidating similar restaurants. The guy who makes my favorite lamb vindaloo is a TERRIBLE sushi chef (in fact, he doesn't even make a very good a saag paneer, imho). If he were trained, he could probably learn to make a mediocre pad thai, but I'd probably still be happier ordering from a known thai restaurant. With 70% annual turnover in the restaurant industry[1], you're going to need to pay for a lot of training to capitalize on the more predictable staffing by supporting a large (i.e. multirestaurant) menu without sacrificing quality. If you plan to support a small menu at scale (e.g. combining a NY borough's worth of Indian restaurants into one giant Indian kitchen), the demand you'll need to support it will be spread out over a borough, so you're likely to have difficulty maintaining service levels.

* People have different tastes in food and there's value in variety. I probably have a neighbor who really likes my restaurant's saag. If you merged the two Indian restaurants near me, had an expert pick the best recipe for each dish on their menus, then taught those to the combined kitchen staff, either my neighbor or I would be disappointed in the saag.

>Long term, making delivered food isn't a good place for a small business. And that'll happen with subsidies or without.

Without subsidies, this ultimately depends on whether it's harder to make good food or to build awareness of said food. A restaurant can hire a delivery driver to transport food, which puts a cap on the cut a DSP can demand from them for the delivery portion of their service. It's slightly less efficient, but trivial to implement. The expensive/hard part is getting people to place orders before your lease runs out. If there are multiple DSPs willing to list your food in order to sell their own delivery services, that seems like a recipe for lower start-up costs, which would tend to favor pop-up restaurants/Kitchen Incubators/iteration at small scale relative to the classic sit-down storefront restaurant model.

[0] [https://a16z.com/2019/05/09/data-network-effects- moats/](https://a16z.com/2019/05/09/data-network-effects-moats/) [1] [https://guide.michelin.com/us/en/illinois/chicago/article/fe...](https://guide.michelin.com/us/en/illinois/chicago/article/features/restaurant- employee-turnover)

<comment><USER15> Great analysis. You've given me some food for thought.

How did you get such deep understanding of that industry?

<comment><USER16> > How did you get such deep understanding of that industry?

I'm not certain I have.

This is just how I'd expect it to work based on the arguments in the slides, my own dinner decision habits, a summer working at Chili's, and a consulting/pricing professional background.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Forgive me but as someone who has a fridge, microwave, stove and oven, delivery does not appeal to me.

There is a whole frozen pizza in the store that sells for 3 dollars, and a slice of pizza from the 7-11 that goes for 2 dollars. Pizza delivery is the one food where delivery has matured, and even today it's a very limited buy.

When do people do it?

Parties -> Almost any demographic

Workload is too high to go out -> Students and younger adults

Going outside is extremely uncomfortable and/or dangerous -> Primarily older

Unmotivated and lazy -> A small fraction of any demographic

The thing that can finally drop prices as we know it is the quadricopter. A self navigating delivery channel has at least reasonable chance to bring the price well into tolerable levels for most americans.

<comment><USER18> You assume the unmotivated and lazy are a small fraction of any demographic. I have an unqualified feeling that it is a big portion, and that it is growing. I hear too many references to netflix tv shows, and a lack of conversations that spark my curiosity. I hear of people not sleeping to catch the latest episodes that aired in another country first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> * [Kitchen incubator - Wikipedia]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_incubator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_incubator))

* [Communal apartment - Wikipedia]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment))

* [Communal dining - Wikipedia]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_dining](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_dining))

* [Soup kitchen - Wikipedia]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_kitchen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_kitchen))

* [Factory-kitchen - Wikipedia]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory-kitchen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory-kitchen))

* [Perpetual stew - Wikipedia]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew))

* [Bhandara (community kitchen) - Wikipedia]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhandara_(community_kitchen)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhandara_\(community_kitchen\)))

* [Coliving - Wikipedia]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coliving](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coliving))

* [Campus Kitchen - Wikipedia]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campus_Kitchen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campus_Kitchen))

* [DC Central Kitchen - Wikipedia]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC_Central_Kitchen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC_Central_Kitchen))

* [Karma Kitchen: Growing in Generosity]([http://www.karmakitchen.org/](http://www.karmakitchen.org/))

* ...

* ...

* ...

* ...

<comment><USER20> Yeah, markdown or something like it would be a nice flourish. But I guess HN kinda likes to keep it simple instead. _shrug_ (hey -- that's some formatting right there)

<comment><USER14> I'm wondering how he got the asterisks to work ...

<comment><USER21> [https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc](https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Every time I see a delivery bike out with a huge backpack full of food, I feel as a society we've gone a bit wrong.

1) The delivery rider/driver is making nothing 2) We are packaging every piece of food and sauce in single use plastic 3) The restaurants are losing money (though this is being addressed somewhat) 4) People aren't leaving their homes for the 5 minutes it takes to walk down the street and support a local business.

I really hope this is a trend that goes away, but I doubt it will.

</comment><comment><USER23> Question: How hard would it be to write create open source components to run a DSP collaboratively, e.g. with the power asymmetry created by aggregation

> aggregated by DSPs

removed?

<comment><USER22> The same argument was made for an open source Uber, and I think it's a noble idea, but it appears the problems of routing and competition are complex enough that it just doesn't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm not aware; are there any examples of super apps in the US? If SnapChat added Dominos delivery, would that be a satisfactory hypothetical?

</comment><comment><USER25> "Ethics aside, they can..."[1]

I expected nothing less from somebody who worked for Uber.

I mean sure, investors will (pardon the pun) eat the ideas up. There is, after all, money to be made. But the overall state of our industry, where people feel very comfortable discussing business models with a prefix of "Ethics aside" is depressing as hell.

Let's not even mention the problem of externalities, of impact on rural communities, of the immense problems that consolidation will bring, or of the exploitive nature of the "gig economy"

[1] Slide 25: [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1v9ifaW1Sxy_oVUtzn63B...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1v9ifaW1Sxy_oVUtzn63BrqXKGcpMJ_eKrqb59BXjjXA/edit#slide=id.g59095fa191_0_139)

<comment><USER26> sort of humorous that they included a cartoon which is mocking a part of their proposal</comment></comment>


Dark Mail Alliance - Digital Email Encryption Kungfu - <AUTHOR> http://darkmail.info/

<comment><AUTHOR> This makes me so happy...just had to share...</comment>


Room-Temperature Nanomachines - <AUTHOR> http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2009/02/room-temperature-nano-machines.html

<comment><USER2> My knowledge of chemistry is really shaky, but I guess if I put two electrodes into a salty solution, I have created "nano spaceships" (ie little molecules that travel through water)?

Maybe I should apply for a research grant...

(Probably the nano car _IS_ cool, I am just saying...).</comment>


Joe Armstrong on Programmer Productivity - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/erlang-programming/OiyGQ4UHqxw/HgGma01CGqYJ <comment><USER5> FTA (favorite part for me)

 _Most time isn 't spent programming anyway - programmer time is spent:

        a) fixing broken stuff that should not be broken
        b) trying to figure out what problem the customer actually wants solving
        c) writing experimental code to test some idea
        d) googling for some obscure fact that is needed to solve a) or b)
        e) writing and testing production code

e) is actually pretty easy once a) - d) are fixed. But most measurements of productivity only measure lines of code in e) and man hours._

For me, b) is a bottleneck. c) is far and away my favorite part. Nothing like green-fielding . . .

<comment><USER6> At least at the larger software companies do they really only measure LOC and man hours? It seems like you could develop decent estimates if you tracked every asset on a job, its performance, and the overall conditions of the job itself.

<comment><USER7> The problem is that the assets are dynamic. If you give me a single complete requirement for some little feature I can give you a pretty accurate estimate. But most of my requirements are things like "Write an app to do X." The only part of that I can estimate is the part I've done before, but if the app were just like all the apps that came before there would be no need for a new app. But the juicy candy center is an abject mystery and there is nothing to compare it to from which to derive an accurate estimate. Once you've dug halfway into it, you'll be tossing out new requirements. Maybe you can make good estimates on those, but your a priori estimate is now probably really off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This one sentence sums up the sociological and psychological problems that retard progress in the tech industry:

"Experiments that show that Erlang is N times better than "something else" won't be believed if N is too high."

That is exactly it. I've had those arguments where I was forced to tell a manager about another project I did for another company, a similar project where things went quickly and smoothly, using technology the manager was not familiar with. And every word I spoke was met with disbelief.

<comment><USER9> Ya, I had a manager laugh at me when I told him I had learned Erlang over the weekend (I am the resident "language lawyer", and Erlang's really not that complex). He didn't seem to be able to grok that a language could be so simple…

<comment><USER10> Languages are simple syntactically, but I'd have a hard time believing that anyone could pick up the set of idioms necessary to effectively use a new language in a few days.

Norvig it covers this well in his Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years ([http://norvig.com/21-days.html](http://norvig.com/21-days.html)) essay.

<comment><USER9> Without knowing any other language? Sure.

Coming from a strong background of similar languages? Sorry, you're wrong there. Perhaps you aren't familiar with Erlang; it is the "everyman" of functional languages. The things I think you'd call "idioms" (not really sure what you mean as that's a very loose term), let's say recursive programming, pattern matching, carry over as-is from any number of other functional languages. Pattern matching? It's a mix of OCaml and Prolog. Terms? Imagine Scheme had tuples in addition to lists. Etc. The only "new" concept is the message system, which if you know anything about networking, is pretty straightforward.

In other words, if you know pretty much any other functional language, it's almost trivial to translate basic programs to & from into Erlang knowing little more than its syntax, which as you concede, is simple.

OTOH, if you're coming from, say, PHP, sure, learning Erlang will be difficult as first you have to understand functional programming. But you're asserting impossibility, so counter-examples are moot.

Ten Years… I've been coding over twenty years in more languages than I can count… I have a good idea how long it takes to learn a language well. Maybe I'm biased because it's the latest language I've studied, but Erlang was the first non-toy language where I skimmed the reference manual, said "huh, that was all unsurprising", and started coding effectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The corollary to a) that I deal with all the time is third party integrations that are poorly documented and that after some time X start magically working even though the third party changed nothing on their side (according to them). Management always thinks "We've integrated things with this vendor before, it will be a snap to do again on a totally different endpoint" and this is never the case.

<comment><USER12> Then there's Facebook.

"We integrated with Facebook a few months ago, it should be easy to do it again."

Famous last words. I've lost count of how many times I've become an "expert" at some aspect of Facebook integration to have it be completely different just a few months later. Google is also really bad about this, at least in the past year or so. It almost makes me want to quit webdev and be a dba or something.

<comment><USER13> Feel ya. So many API's and yet it seems like there is no _i_ nterface - <USER2> they change all the time. Might as well don't have them at all.

DBA it is then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> this is partly why I advocate a _slow code movement_ similar to the slow food movement. instead of sprinting I would like to walk to the destination, avoid the pains of broken ankles and repairing shoes whilst running in them.

I would like to explore to find a sane and reasonable approach and not be driven by artificial deadlines guessed at three months ago but by todays business need.

i would like to actually be measured on business value generated, not lines of code written.

I would like to improve and simplify, deliver real value and savour the joy of actually creating.

this may of course explain why I feel totally unproductive at times

<comment><USER15> I think that is entirely in line with the true values of agile, which haven't really gotten through.

Slow food isn't about slowness for the sake of slowness. It's just about being realistic and interested in the long-term. It's about saving energy and mental stress.

One beautiful expression of this ideal is in "Domain-Driven Design."

<comment><USER16> Agile in the sense you are describing really has the wrong name. Agile implies fast; from Apple's Dictionary:

 _able to move quickly and easily; able to think and understand quickly_

Agile should have been called Adaptable or some other name that has less implication of speed and more implication of accomodation of unknown or changing requirements.

No putting that toothpaste back in the tube at this point though.

<comment><USER17> Though this has the same problem as "cheap". People always equate "fast" or "quick" with "quick right now" and "cheap" as "cheap right now". There are enough examples in long-term projects that this is not true (though the converse is true, as well. And those problems which transist from short-term to long-term are just nasty)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I rewrote a (~10k lines) C++ app to erlang back when I was learning erlang, and saw a ~75% reduction in lines of code.

[http://www.metabrew.com/article/rewriting-playdar-c-to- erlan...](http://www.metabrew.com/article/rewriting-playdar-c-to-erlang- massive-savings)

I expect the 'N' value varies wildly depending on what you are building, and whichever language you are comparing against.

<comment><USER19> At a previous job I rewrote a (~9k lines) Java app in Java and ended up with a 77% reduction in lines of code! So it would appear that the "smart programmer effect" is likely larger than the effect of most languages.

<comment><USER18> In this case, I was re-implementing the C++ app I had written - so it was the same programmer authoring both codebases.

I expect if I rewrote either codebase again, it might shrink even more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've often wondered what the software development world would be like if we used prototypes. Experimental hacking seems like a cut-down version of this concept.

But what if we actually built things that we already agree in advance to throw away? Maybe even start from two or three different plausible designs, and push on each one for a while until one seems to be winning? Then rewrite it, learning from the other contenders and from the prototype itself, all before shipping.

The obvious answer is that it would take too long. But I'm not so sure. They say designing software takes too long, also, but when I spend a few weeks designing, the implementation ends up going smoothly and hitting the target. Usually the features that are designed thoroughly at the start of the release hit the target, and other "quick" features that are added in later, sans design, take longer than the designed features and end up pushing the release out. Any overruns or missteps in the implementation of the well-designed features seem insignificant in comparison to things that skimped on design work.

<comment><USER21> This is a well-discussed concept already - see the concept of "Spikes" in Agile development, or to a lesser extent, the idea of "Tracer Bullets" from _The Pragmatic Programmer_.

Of course, what's done in practice tends to differ, unfortunately.

<comment><USER20> "Of course, what's done in practice tends to differ, unfortunately."

Exactly... I've never really seen this happen beyond what I would consider "experimental hacking". Maybe it happens somewhere.

<comment><USER14> I like Fred George's _developer anarchy_ in this regard - especially the concept of micro-web-services. they are the equivalent of a unix command - <USER3> one thing (well) and join up with MQ. if you make a service small enough you can be confident of putting it up as a prototype and rewrite it next weekend in node.js

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's a problem with language productivity comparisons that Armstrong mentions: it's impossible to write the same program in two different languages. If you have the same team write it, their second try will benefit from everything they learned the first time, and that is so huge a part of programming that it is sure to distort the outcome and may even dwarf any language effects. But if you use different teams instead, you've traded one confounding variable for another—the effect of switching teams—which is also hugely influential. Thus it's impossible to do an apples-to-apples comparison, and most such experiments deserve high skepticism. It's too easy to consciously or unconsicously engineer the outcome you expect, which is presumably why we nearly always hear that the experimenter's pet language won the day. Has the experimenter's pet language ever _not_ won the day?

That makes me think of a more modest way to do these experiments that might return more reliable results: use the same team twice, but have them solve the problem in their favorite language first. That is, if A is the pet language and you want to compare A to B, write the program first in A and then in B. This biases the test in B's favour, because A will get penalized for all the time it took to learn about the problem while B will get all that benefit for free. Since there's already a major bias in favor of A, this levels the playing field some.

Here's why I think this might be more reliable. If you run the experiment this way and A comes out much better, you now have an answer to the charge that the second time was easier: all that benefit went to B and B still lost. Conversely, if A doesn't come out much better, you now have evidence that the language effect isn't so great once you account for the learning effect.

<comment><USER23> This approach strikes me as the most realistic. If there is an existing codebase in the preferred language A, the obvious question, if B wins, is "Do we rewrite the code in B?"

The only downside, and I think adding the language C tries to defuse it, is that whatever the team writes first will always stick. For example: if I wrote a version with dynamic typing (say in Ruby), then redid it with static typing (Haskell), of course I'm going to try to reuse types. The extreme example (Greenspun's rule) is if my pet language A is Lisp: regardless of what B is, the team could try to write a half-baked lisp runtime on top of B. The style carries over, and sometimes it doesn't translate exactly. I don't know how to solve this.

<comment><USER22> Good point—there are more effects than just "learning about the problem" that carry over to the next time you write the program. Once your brain has imprinted on a particular design for solving the problem, you'll probably carry that over to the next implementation. It may not be the design you'd have come up with if you were thinking in B in the first place and, short of erasing your memory and starting over, there's no way to test that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm not sure the growth in the amount of software in the environment (contributor to A) is really that much of a problem. After all, he says we might have "thousands" of times more software, but we certainly aren't spending thousands of times more fixing it. That's because today's software is significantly less broken than the software of yore.

We're standing on the shoulders of giants. Underlying most of our environments is Unix (or Linux, same diff), which is basically the same as it was 20, 30 years ago. We're also running on http, an astoundingly good design. There are lots of other basics, none of which are all that complex, and all of which are finely tuned.

More to the point, a) represents a practical limit. If our environments get too flaky due to poorly understood configuration or bugs, we ultimately can't get programming done. But not pushing to where it hurts some means not using the latest, greatest tools that can amplify our power as programmers - <USER4> same tools that let us have thousands of times more software than we used to, _without_ losing any more time to configuration/bugs than we did decades ago.

And beyond that, a lot of the business opportunity in the industry lies with running along just behind the bleeding edge, being firstest-with-mostest to the new and powerful technologies. So unless you're in a safe business relatively independent of new tech, you're going to bleed a bit.

<comment><USER25> >might have "thousands" of times more software

He said thousands of times more lines in each piece of software, not thousands of times more software.

>That's because today's software is significantly less broken than the software of yore.

As a per-line measurement, yes. As a per-program measurement, not even close. Nor as a per-feature measurement, because those 1000x locs are largely going into abstraction layers at the bottom of the stack and chrome at the top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > 30 years ago there was far less software, but the software there was usually > worked without any problems - the code was a lot smaller and consequently > easier to understand

Pardon the intermission, but this is one of the areas where node.js shines IMO. I can read the complete source code for a very complex application, or at least know that each module has a reasonably-sized source and _is_ readable if the need arises. Very small modules and using composition is encouraged, not restricted to a fringe community, and you also get to share tooling and libraries with the browser. All that on top of a friendly, functional language. It really feels like a step forward.

<comment><USER27> Never used nodejs before - is node's packaging system different from Python's or Ruby's?

<comment><USER28> Yes. The biggest difference is that there is no global namespace for modules.

        require('my-dependency')

returns a value, rather than aliasing identifiers into the current scope. So you end up with code like:

        var myDep = require('my-dependency')
        exports.doSomething = function (x) {
          myDep.doSomethingToAnX(x);
          // more code here
        }

The Python import (and Go and probably others) works in a similar way, except that in node, even the module names (the argument to require) are local to each module. That is: `require('my-dependency')` can return different values depending on the location of the file that called it. This means your project can depend on two different libraries that both depend on conflicting versions of "my-dependency". The mechanism by which this is accomplished is simple and straightforward. Another nice side-effect (as compared to Ruby) is that you can easily isolate a copy of any given dependency to monkey-patch or otherwise modify it, without affecting anybody else. (Not true of built-in globals such as String or Function, but that's a shortcoming of JavaScript, not Node)

Of course, the event+callback architecture and preference for writing everything in a manual continuation-passing-style makes working in Node suck for a host of other reasons, but the module system is really quite nice.

<comment><USER29> Modified globals is the fault of bad coding, not node. There are valid reasons for using globals, but it's well known to be bad practice to modify standard classes these days.

If someone wants not yet released features, they can compile to JS/node with source maps (i.e. Traceur, Coffeescript). This also solves the cps/callback issue (i.e. Iced Coffeescript).

Npm is also _incredibly_ easy to publish to (one line in the CLI). That leads to a ton of packages released that would otherwise hit friction in release process in other package managers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nice post although I disagree that 30 years ago stuff mostly worked. That's not how I remember it but I guess his main point was that there was a lot less software then.

</comment><comment><USER31>
      The problem is we don't do similar things over and over again. Each new unsolved
      problem is precisely that, a new unsolved problem.

And if tasks are similar, and they can be made mechanical (or at least, commonalities can be factored out), it should be turned over to the machine itself.

</comment><comment><USER32> > I've been in this game for many years now, and I have the impression that a) > is taking a larger and larger percentage of my time.

Have the same feeling.

</comment><comment><USER33> And it also depends on the editors, debuggers and other tools they use/know to use.

<comment><USER34> Tools are definitely important, however proficiency with those tools _and_ most importantly, proficiency with the language are the largest determining factors. It takes months (if not years) to get to the point where you're really comfortable in a new language and can crank out volumes of code relatively quickly.

If you made me write with Eclipse, I'd probably be horribly inefficient. It's not that Eclipse is a bad tool, it's just that it lends itself to languages that I'm not super fond of writing in (ie. Java, ActionScript, etc.) and it's much different than the way I'm used to working (with vi, git and a command line). If you transplant a C# programmer into the vi and Python world, they'll usually run away screaming. Neither is better, they're just different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Investments in complexity bring fewer and fewer benefits, until maintenance alone consumes all resources. [http://t.co/CL87QjJNjg](http://t.co/CL87QjJNjg)

</comment><comment><USER36> Nothing kills programmer productivity faster than management.

</comment><comment><USER37> How about the perspective of Joe Armstrong (Green Day)?

<comment><USER38> He's sleeping right now. Try again in twelve days.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Mount Exodus – Sinatra App to Convert TypePad to WordPress - <AUTHOR> http://www.mtexodus.com

<comment><AUTHOR> This tool will convert TypePad/MovableType content to WordPress, update image references, and produce an audit of images that you can download.

Tech: * Sinatra * Heroku * Bootstrap</comment>


Alcohol is a direct cause of seven forms of cancer, finds study - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/22/alcohol-direct-cause-seven-forms-of-cancer-study <comment><USER2> [https://health.spectator.co.uk/study-proves-alcohol- causes-c...](https://health.spectator.co.uk/study-proves-alcohol-causes- cancer-the-problem-there-wasnt-a-study/)

"It's a comment piece. It doesn't contain any new research, nor does it contain statistical analysis of previous research. It's not a meta-analysis or a systematic review. It is a short essay in the 'For Debate' section of the journal in which one woman gives her opinion about whether correlation equals causation when it comes to the epidemiological evidence on alcohol and cancer."

<comment><USER3> The title of this article is also helpful: «Study 'proves alcohol causes cancer'. The problem? There wasn't a study.»

<comment><USER4> it was a study. the abstract explains its methods, results, and conclusions. it has 44 references.

folks, just go read it for yourself, the DOI is: 10.1111/add.13477

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> After skipping through the presentation for this paper [1], I get the feeling the claims of the article are a tad outlandish:

"The study, [...], concludes that there is more than simply a link or statistical association between alcohol and cancer that could be explained by something else."

But all the presentation uses to back up its claim is statistics and the sample size is small. I assume the presentation doesn't omit any way to draw conclusions that the paper contains. The latter is behind a paywall so I haven't read it.

People in this forum [2] seem to have similar concerns.

[1] [http://alcoholaction.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/Cancer- deaths-...](http://alcoholaction.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/Cancer-deaths- attributable-to-alcohol-in-New-Zealanders-under-80.pdf) [2] [https://www.bu.edu/alcohol-forum/critique-188-alcohol- attrib...](https://www.bu.edu/alcohol-forum/critique-188-alcohol-attributable- cancer-in-new-zealand-28-june-2016/)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is how I see things going with alcohol. Some of the following assumptions are based on what my parents have told me about their generation (in Canada).

\- everybody used to smoke, now it seems crazy to most people

\- people also didn't wear seat belts, drove after drinking more frequently (according to my parents anyway) and probably had about 3-4 different vegetables in their diet

\- now, in many circles, smoking (regularly) is looked at like a meth addiction

\- although we still battle with processed/junk food I'd say the options to eat healthier are here and many people would gasp if they found out you ate only meat and potatoes

Yet, alcohol, in North America, is still widely looked at as "OK (just don't drive)". I think we'll see more studies and campaigns about the health risks of alcohol over the next decade. In 20 years, in certain places, drinking might be looked at like smoking is now.

It's going to be so boring.

<comment><USER7> OTOH, there are ton of people in Mediterranean countries who drink their 2/3 glasses of wine a day and live to a ripe old age.

<comment><USER8> They also consume a lot of olive oil, tomatoes, seafood and coffee. They are super chill and spend a lot of time with friends outside.

Also, people in the Mediterranean pretty much only drink wine. They are quite moderate drinkers too, never really getting wasted either.

Anyhow, that is what I saw when I was there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Everything we eat both causes and prevents cancer [1]. The two real questions are: What are the odds? And, where is the good balance? The linked paper says "Current estimates suggest that alcohol-attributable cancers at these sites make up 5.8% of all cancer deaths world-wide." [2] The earlier linked recommendation is basically "keep your average <= 1 drink a day" [3] But, I didn't read the details.

[1] [http://www.sciencealert.com/images/art- apr-15/Medical_studie...](http://www.sciencealert.com/images/art- apr-15/Medical_studies-05.0.png)

[2] [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.13477/abstrac...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.13477/abstract)

[3] [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/08/tough- drinki...](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/08/tough-drinking- guidelines-not-scaremongering-says-chief-medical-officer)

</comment><comment><USER10> There are a lot of people (alcoholics, partygoers, etc) and entities (alcohol producers) with a vested interest in ignoring or burying this kind of research. Alcohol is far too entrenched in our society for anyone to successfully campaign against it.

<comment><USER11> All the news reports I've seen connecting alcohol with cancer come from the UK. Maybe because they have a National Health Service that's trying to minimize national healthcare costs? Or maybe because their researchers are less beholden to industry?

Or maybe that's a false connection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Blue zone: «a demographic and/or geographic area of the world where people live measurably longer lives.»

«Characteristics: The people inhabiting Blue Zones share common lifestyle characteristics that contribute to their longevity. ... Buettner in his book provide a list of nine lessons, covering the lifestyle of blue zones people: ... 6. Moderate alcohol intake ...»

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

</comment><comment><USER12> The English NHS has a useful "Behind the headlines" site, and they've written about this.

[http://www.nhs.uk/news/2016/07July/Pages/alcohol-a-direct- ca...](http://www.nhs.uk/news/2016/07July/Pages/alcohol-a-direct-cause-of- seven-types-of-cancer.aspx)

<comment><USER13> >An additional limitation to keep in mind is that this data mainly appeared to be from observational studies. These cannot prove cause and effect. The individual studies will likely have varied considerably in the additional health and lifestyle factors they took account of when looking at the links with alcohol. For example, smoking, diet and physical activity are all factors likely to be associated both with level of alcohol consumption and cancer risk.

In other words correlation does not equal causation. If someone who exercises several days per week, has a healthy diet, and drinks a glass or two of wine each night, would that really have the same potential to cause cancer as someone who drinks 2 beers every day, eats fast food, and smokes cigarettes? I'd like to see long term studies done with individuals who have a "healthy" lifestyle vs "unhealthy" with alcohol involved if at all possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > The study, published in the scientific journal Addiction, concludes that > there is more than simply a link or statistical association between alcohol > and cancer that could be explained by something else.

This isn't published to any of the major health journals, rather it's been published in the journal Addiction which probably doesn't have the most balanced view on the role of alcohol in society.

<comment><USER4> "which probably doesn't have the most balanced view on the role of alcohol in society"

source?

<comment><USER15> 'Addiction' kind of wraps it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Even without complete knowledge of biological mechanisms [of how alcohol causes cancer], the epidemiological evidence can support the judgment" \- I think they basically are saying that there is enough correlation to imply causation.

But we all know no such claim can be made until there is "complete knowledge of biological mechanisms".

<comment><USER17> Well, you can't claim to KNOW. But you can claim to be very suspicious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm surprised that this is a thing?

I've just taken it for granted alcohol and breathing in small particles causes all types of cancer?

Doesn't everyone know this?

I get people don't realise campfires are the same as cigarettes.

But alcohol, I'd have thought a given. People don't know it gives you cancer?

That said, it's a propaganda piece, so what if it does? Working a job gives you cancer.

The death rate is what concerns me and compared to other issues in society, like drink driving.

<comment><USER19> Honestly I had never heard of a link between alcohol and cancer before.

<comment><USER20> Wow, this doesn't surprise me either, but that's not to say there shouldn't be more awareness!

For example, one article from 2011 mentions a link between alcohol and stomach cancer:

"If heavy drinking is a cause of stomach cancer, it may be related to one of the metabolic byproducts of alcohol -- called acetaldehyde. The substance is a known human carcinogen, Duell's team notes."

Note that this is related to _heavy_ drinking. One glass of wine per week can be beneficial to your health, for example.

Liver cancer is also commonly known to be associated with alcoholics.

<comment><USER10> The problem is that a lot of studies are bogus (p-hacking, deliberately hysterical to gain media attention , etc) so it's becoming difficult to winnow through it all and find the stuff that's meaningful.

This is actually the fairly troubling reality of medical research in general. People who have financial interests in achieving particular conclusions have managed to weaponize these kinds of studies. There's a very real risk of important research getting lost in the tremendous amount of noise that's being generated.

<comment><USER21> Too true. I'm going to err on the side of caution with ethanol. My reasoning is as follows:

Ethanol is a solvent, our brains are mostly fat - this should be a cause for concern. Cell walls are a phospholipid bilayer, which probably, at least partly, explains why ethanol is an irritant to our tissues. Anything that causes irritation over a long enough time can lead to an increase in cell turnover and inflammation. Anything that leads to an increased cell turnover and inflammation has the potential increase the risks of cancer.

Additionally, for all the supposed health benefits of drinking [whatever the fashionable number is this week] glasses of wine, all the experiments I've done by pouring wine on to plants and insects has led to a failure to thrive or death, whereas putting green leafy vegetables on a plant or insect typically leads to the organism thriving, or at worst disinterest.

Also, ethanol can be used as a toxic agent for the purposes of sterilisation. That doesn't sound like the sort of thing I would want to drink.

Additionally, even the organisms that produce alcohol for human consumption, the Saccharomyces yeast organisms, consider ethanol a _waste_ product.

I'm not going to wait for conclusive evidence to prove that alcohol does or doesn't cause an increased risk of some types of cancer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think this is BS. Alcohol was consumed in enormous quantities since BC but cancer epidemics is recent thing. I dont doubt it might contribute to some forms of cancer but claim og direct cause is something else.

<comment><USER23> How do you know that? Do you have some data on alcohol consumption since BC, and how broadly it was consumed by the world population (i.e. was it only the tiny fraction of wealthy people)? Do you have some data that shows "cancer epidemics is recent thing"?

Even if you have this data, have you eliminated all the other variables? E.g. longer lifespans may account for higher cancer rates.

<comment><USER3> Dionysios is the greek god for among other things, wine. He's been divinised for bringing wine to greece. It was invented in the northern caucasus 6 thousand years ago. If you ever read any classical literature or antique philosophy, you'll have a reference for how wine was consumed in the antiquity. And if you want to see how much the antiques lived, see Diogenes Laerteos.

<comment><USER23> Most literature until modern times was written by, about and for the wealthy. Diogenes Laertius was no where near a common person. Nor was any philosopher for that matter. I'm kind of shocked that you consider antique philosophy a window into how the vast majority of people lived in the past.

Again, show me the data.

<comment><USER3> Go find the data. I'm not going to make archaeological research to convince you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Light triggers gold in unexpected way - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-11-triggers-gold-unexpected.html <comment><USER2> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmonic_nanoparticles](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmonic_nanoparticles)

Plasmonic nanoparticles are particles whose electron density can couple with electromagnetic radiation of wavelengths that are far larger than the particle due to the nature of the dielectric-metal interface between the medium and the particles

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_plasmon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_plasmon)

Surface plasmons (SPs) are coherent delocalized electron oscillations that exist at the interface between any two materials where the real part of the dielectric function changes sign across the interface (e.g. a metal-dielectric interface, such as a metal sheet in air). SPs have lower energy than bulk (or volume) plasmons which quantise the longitudinal electron oscillations about positive ion cores within the bulk of an electron gas (or plasma).

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmon)

In physics, a plasmon is a quantum of plasma oscillation. Just as light (an optical oscillation) consists of photons, the plasma oscillation consists of plasmons. The plasmon can be considered as a quasiparticle since it arises from the quantization of plasma oscillations, just like phonons are quantizations of mechanical vibrations. Thus, plasmons are collective (a discrete number) oscillations of the free electron gas density. For example, at optical frequencies, plasmons can couple with a photon to create another quasiparticle called a plasmon polariton.</comment>


With $600M 'Blank Check' IPO, VCs Experiment on Startup Listings - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-14/with-600-million-blank-check-ipo-vcs-experiment-on-startup-listings <comment><USER2> So SPACs or blank cheque companies aren't new. They've been around for many years.

[http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/spac.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/spac.asp)

Essentially people collect money upfront and then go deal hunting, after a period of time, usually 2years or less, they then go back to the people who put their money in the deal and give them the choice of pulling their money out and taking a nominal interest rate gain, or putting their money into the deal and collecting warrants along with the deal as a sweetener.

This is very common in the minerals and mining space where serial entrepreneurs found an oil company, go drilling and then sell the company once its got a well up to a big producer. It's a way for these deal makers who know everyone in their industry to help smaller companies get liquidity, while of course helping themselves and the unit holders to make money.

They benefit the unit holders because its a place for them to park alot of money risk free with a decent call option on the upside.

Asa hedge fund in today's market the problem is often too much capital and too few places to invest it. SPACS offer a way to park say $100 million in a vehicle that has alot of upside with not alto of downside. It has a very similar payoff to Venture Capital in that most SPAC's end up not working out but the few that do make it worth while.

As a side note, if you ever work for a hedge fund or any investment company, you'll get the idea of asymmetric risk drilled into your head. Meaning you want your deals to have the potential for 10x upside with say 1x downside.

The key to running a successful SPAC is almost always:

\- who is running it, do they have deep industry connections and the ability to get deals that no one else can

\- the company being acquired needs to be in need of capital and not in a position to raise it. or put another way, it needs to be win/win for both investors and the company owners.

This particular SPAC seems to solve neither of these needs as typically silicon valley tech companies have no problems raising money nor do they have any issues going public, so this SPAC fails the second test.

It also seems to fail the first test as I can't see why the founders are in any better position to be deal rain makers than say Sequoia, KPCB, or A16Z.

<comment><USER3> Off topic completely, but is there a long bull case for energy? Are we seeing a bottom in oil and natgas prices or will secular changes and renewable consumption dominate? And are infrastructure funds such as $ALPS, $ENFR a good way to get exposure and long term income distributions? Thanks in advance!

As far as Chamath's Hedosophia, not sure I'd bet against him just yet. He's got a pretty good track record of winning ;)

<comment><USER4> Everyone looks like a genius in a bull market.

<comment><USER5> And everyone looks like an idiot in a bear market?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Matt Levine doesn't think this is a good idea: [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-15/icos- vcs-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-15/icos-vcs-ipos-and- spacs)

<comment><USER6> Wow, yea, doesn't seem like a good idea:

 _A final thing about SPACs is that they are so expensive. Banks charge a rack rate of about 7 percent for initial public offerings, though big sexy tech IPOs tend to be done more cheaply. SPAC sponsors compensate themselves rather more lavishly. Hedosophia 's sponsor -- a Cayman Islands company owned by Palihapitiya and his co-founder -- invested $25,000 to found the SPAC. In exchange for that nominal payment, and their work on finding a company to take public, they get 20 percent of the SPAC's stock. (They are also are putting in another $12 million or so to buy warrants in connection with its IPO.) A 20 percent fee for taking a company public is just ... more ... than a 7 percent fee. And that's not even counting the 5.5 percent fee that Credit Suisse charged for taking Hedosophia public! Something like a quarter of every dollar that investors are putting into Hedosophia is going to compensate financiers for doing the work of (ultimately) taking a unicorn public, which is a funny way to make that process more efficient._

<comment><USER7> REmber though that a retail investor can buy this stock, and pay 25% to get in on a unicorn IPO.

To get in only paying 7% (i.e. at the IPO), you have to already be a wealthy investor so you can get some of the IPO stock.

The 18% difference is your fee for deal access basically.

I'm not saying it's right, but it explains why it makes sense.

<comment><USER8> Interesting thought, You should email Matt, I'm sure he would have a response that he would put in his column.

<comment><USER7> Ok, done!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For startups... the biggest disadvantage to a SPAC is fee structure. The biggest advantage for a SPAC is timing. In tech startup-landia I believe timing greatly outweighs ~13% fee difference.

Many startups start the IPO process which takes 6-12 months from start to finish only to find that their IPO will be delayed due to unfavorable market timing. In tech IPOs, this can mean upwards of 20% pricing differences.

I'm surprised at how well this SPAC is trading at given how generally unsuccessful SPACs have been historically.

I believe there's a lot of opportunity in SPAC's little brother, the RTO on TSX-V, for startups. There are plenty of good startups that are no longer in a venture-fundable state (going after markets of sub $500M with less than 20% YoY growth) where liquidity and investment could help all stakeholders. If you know companies that fit this profile: $3M-$10M revenue, breakeven and 7-25% YoY growth... let me know.

</comment><comment><USER10> Here is what I don't get. If a company can IPO just for the sake of having a publicly tradable security, what is the big overhead for a large company. I am really starting to believe the only reason companies aren't IPO'ing isn't because its hard or expensive, but because they are getting stupid good deals from private investors to burn through cash.

<comment><USER11> > isn't because its hard or expensive, but because they are getting stupid > good deals from private investors to burn through cash.

It's actually both reasons combined. It is more challenging to be a public company today vs 20 years ago, in terms of regulatory compliance and investor pressure. And the private capital markets have massively expanded in that time, effectively enabling any sum of capital required by a private company (as demonstrated so well by Uber). If you're a successful private company, you do not _need_ the public capital markets except as the final liquidation exit. The public market has become the last stop on the exit train, because that capital has the greatest annoyances / friction / pressure / activism with it.

Let's say you're a successful, Yelp-like company. You're not Uber or Facebook. You IPO. You're growing solidly. But uh oh, you miss your quarterly number, you deliver respectable 22% growth instead of 27% growth that was pegged by analysts. And forbid you dare to lower guidance so much as a penny. Your stock is gonna tank. Follow that up with a few quarters of good growth that doesn't hit the expectations, and you're going to find a pile of big activist types pushing for a sale of the company (that is still growing nicely). If you're a private company, and you barely miss growth expectations, your valuation is not going to get cut in half.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not a new concept that's for sure, but this just seems like another VC fund with not much of a difference.

When you get past the fees discussion and everything else what you end up with is $600MM in capital to invest.

That isn't enough to buy a single unicorn, regardless of valuation, so you are buying a secondary stake, but then the shares you purchased still don't have liquidity until the company itself decides to IPO.

So this doesn't really do anything to improve the IPO landscape, and it's just a fancy shell for buying secondary shares.

Unless, through their purchase of secondary shares they are also going to receive updated financials which they will be reporting under their umbrella company. But without those other companies being public, the data doesn't undergo as many controls and scrutiny, and without a controlling stake of the company they invested in, they can't force much change or anything else, so ultimately you still end up with little transparency into the financials of the underlying companies.

If anything, this just delays the IPO landscape further as now there is another secondary market to sell shares, which means founders and other key people can cash out, and wait on the eventual IPO.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think that if a VC is using the public markets to raise capital, then we're in a stock market bubble.

</comment><comment><USER14> Ah crap, it's 1999 again.

<comment><USER15> No, this is the exact opposite, it's the anti-1999. He's offering late stage companies this deal - _don 't IPO_, stay private, avoid the IPO and the making a bunch of connected Wall Streeters rich on your IPO pop (money that should have gone to the startup instead), and sell a large portion of your equity to us instead. We'll not only make a large enough investment that it's a viable alternative to what you would take in an IPO, but we'll also act as active advisor that helps scale your business (and we're the team that scaled Facebook so we know what we're doing).

It's a compelling offer for any founding team still in control of their unicorn startup and who is still in it to build a great business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For asset managers, the reason you form a SPAC is because you will get upside in the form of convertible warrants that will net you ~20% ownership, essentially for free (cost of your time to find and close a deal, and minimal upfront cost), assuming the stock price outperforms the original issue price.

You should ask yourself why an existing owner who believes in the future of their company would be willing to give up 20% upside to avoid the cost of an IPO. I would suggest that the very act of giving up this 20% promote for a 'hot' unicorn tells you something about the valuation that the SPAC eventually does a deal at.

<comment><USER17> Or a company is raising a normal round of funding and this is suddenly a much better option - 1) funding, 2) liquidity in public markets, 3) backing of SC and whatever help they may offer. If I was raising 600M anyways, these added benefits seem like a good deal to me.

<comment><USER16> Why not just ask Social Capital to invest out of their VC fund? The only difference is liquidity in public markets, and if that's all you want, why are you giving up 20% of the upside from your current valuation when it would cost you less than 1% of your current to IPO yourself?

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure where you're getting the 20% number...?

The ownership stake is dependent on how the negotiations go and how much the company is looking to raise at what valuation/terms. Social Capital will argue a liquidity premium should be applied, and I'm sure the company will say what you're saying (they can IPO <1%). However, they could both stand to benefit, so I see a deal happening with this SPAC

<comment><USER16> SPACs issue units to their founders that will convert into approximately 20% ownership upon the successful completion of a deal

<comment><USER17> No it's the founders of the SPAC (Chamath et. al) get 20% of the SPAC, which will then be diluted once they merge with the target startup.

I do think you do raise a fair question of what stake Chamath et. al should get for sourcing a deal. 20% is definitely high, and I think a typical SPAC is something like 5% sourcing stake for the owners.

<comment><USER16> Sorry for late reply!

20% is standard SPAC comp.

Also yes, I apologize, you are right - they get 20% of the value of the SPAC, so if they buy 10% of a company, they are only getting 20% promote on that 10%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I recently stumbled upon a "project" called Own Austria, which promises you to own a part of Austria's products. Essentially you buy partial ownership of a fund that only invests in Austrian companies. The selection criteria? A)They must be Austrian and b)"be important in regards to jobs and revenue". There is no clear investment strategy. I chuckled and moved on.

This somehow looks a bit the same, although the people behind this are quite promising.

<comment><USER19> Is that essentially different from buying in to the S&P 500?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The special purpose vehicle described doesn't add up. By definition, "unicorn" references a $1billion valuation minimum and a 600M fund isn't sufficient to acquire it. Unless they mean the principals will identify and acquire startups with unicorn possibilities _before_ the companies reach that stage. ...Which is what regular VC does anyway.

Also confusing that they tout ability to help build product market fit as an advantage for targets when in almost all cases, a unicorn startup would have achieved that: _"We, i.e. the team that helped build Facebook, will help you build a bottom up understanding of product market fit"_

</comment><comment><USER21> Distributed ledgers may be a better way to manage ownership. But that innovation is best suited for standardized stakes subject to audits, regulation and oversight. Startups is where everything is non standard and no track record has been established. Innovation in contract mechanics adds little value and the way it is done at the moment it takes away a lot of the already limited transparency and accountability.

Expect to get hurt once the bubble dynamic fades.

<comment><USER22> It sounds like you're thinking of ICO, but this article is about IPO</comment></comment>


[Help] Execute User Provide JavaScript on NodeJS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/arunoda/jailguard

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi I wrote this library. I need to execute user provided JS. And that is quite dangerous. So I come up with this project and its runs JS

* In a Separate Process (using forking) * Detects Never Ending loops * Blocks eval, setTimeout and setInterval

Please evaluate to make this better</comment>


Wikipedia, Notability, and Open Source Software, Part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://ubuntard.com/2010/03/wikipedia-notability-and-open-source-software-part-2/

<comment><USER2> The English Wikipedia has a particular philosophy regarding notability / citation (It's actually much more liberal than the German Wikipedia) that some people find contrary to their personal desires for a more "free/open" Encyclopedia. I've often wondered why they don't just fork wikipedia and go build their own and see if it is more successful.

What a lot of people fail to realize, is that there are actually _two_ common use "Sum of human knowledge" indexes. Wikipedia is just one. The other one is usually in the upper right hand of your browser. Put high quality content out there, organize it, and link to it, and it will be found.

The dwm people (and I'm a huge fan of keeping dwm in wikipedia, I really do think it's quite a notable WM) were never, ever in risk of people not being able to find excellent reference material on their WM - and isn't that, at the end of the day, what really counts?

<comment><USER3> What I think burns people about the deleting isn't that the info can't be found, but that WP is, in effect, judging what's important and what's not. Considering the amount of crap in WP that's _not_ deleted, it's kind of insulting to say "you're less important than this."

Click random article a few times. I just did 3 times. The first article was good (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mae_Yih>), the second two are kind of ridiculous (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesley_Elliott> and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_Century_Fox>).

<comment><USER2> I guess the question is, are the administrators applying the rules fairly and consistently, or is there some bias which betrays their supposed NPOV (Neutral Point of View)?

Seriously, there are some AMAZING encyclopedias which consist of material that is 99% unsuitable for inclusion in Wikipedia. I'm thinking of things like snopes, tvtropes. etc...

The community that cares about DWM, FVWM, Compiz, lwm wm, xwm (all of which I've used at one point or another, and, only half of which are currently in wikipedia) should do likewise, create their WM Encyclopedia - (wmipedia? wmtrove?) and just tell wikipedia to go stuff it.

The question as to where to draw the line is a little gray - I _personally_ think that all widely deployed (That is, more than a couple thousand users) systems like Window Managers, Linux Distros, Applications, should have a home on wikipedia - My home town of Lumby only has a population of 1800 people, and it managed to get an article - why is a window manager that is home to 10s of thousands of people any less notable?

I think every release of Linus's linux kernel should have its own page on wikipedia. (Check out "<http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges> and tell me that each release isn't notable).

My only requirement is that it have _some_ breadth of interest beyond the author who writes the article, and that the material maintain a high level of quality, NPOV, and citation.

But, I'm clearly one of those lumped in the "Inclusionist" world - which is clearly a direction the English Wikipedia is not going.

<comment><USER4> Why are things like tvtropes not suitable for an Encyclopedia?

I mean, you take it as obvious that such material is not suitable for WP, but I wonder why? It's not clear to me.

<comment><USER2> tvtropes _is_ an encyclopedia.

Re: material not suitable for WP - most of it fails the notability clause. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notability_in_Wikipedia>

<comment><USER5> Well, it might not belong in its present form—but, since they're compatible and cite each other fairly frequently, it'd be nice if the entirety of other encyclopedias could exist "attached" to Wikipedia somehow, so that any archival efforts going into Wikipedia would bring them along as well. Since wikis are usually "flat" namespaces, perhaps as subgraphs (that is, subdirectories)?

There are so many wikis that are basically "Wikipedia, but for this particular topic that on its own isn't notable enough"—if these could all be merged into Wikipedia this way, the ecosystems of both Wikipedia and its offshoots would probably be a lot better off. The members of each wouldn't be tending only their own own walled gardens, but rather crosslinking and cross-editing more heavily—and putting things where they really belong, instead of trying to justify their inclusion into their own project of residence!

They wouldn't even need to exist "within" wikipedia physically; perhaps Mediawiki could adopt something that works for articles like Trackbacks work for blogs, where all articles from all "public encyclopaedia of [topic] project" Mediawikis show up in one another's indexes?

<comment><AUTHOR> A limited form of what you are describing already exists. MediaWiki supports something called 'interwiki links',* so you can write e.g. [[TVtropes:PlotThreads]] to link directly to the Plot Threads page on TV tropes. In this way many disparate wikis can be wired together quite simply, if desired. I don't remember if the software supports shared indexes or backlinks or anything of that kind, however, although that is available between sister projects (such as Wikipedia and Wikitionary).

Culturally, however, Wikipedia seems to frown upon using this kind of link to external encyclopedias. If information is notable, it should be included in Wikipedia or one of the sister projects; if it is a source, it should be referenced as such. Any kind of 'more information' external page doesn't really have a place in such a system. So we're back to needing to 'fix' Wikipedia.

* See <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map> for the current list of supported interwiki prefixes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Motivation inside your company - creating the right environment for a productivity boost - <AUTHOR> http://www.sergiutruta.com/2007/04/01/motivation-inside-your-company-creating-the-right-environment-for-a-productivity-boost/ <comment><AUTHOR> hi guys, please let me know your thoughts on this article I've written. It's my first post here in ycombinator, though I'm reading the news here for 2 or 3 months now. great community!</comment>


Trip report: Summer ISO C++ standards meeting in Toronto - <AUTHOR> https://herbsutter.com/2017/07/15/trip-report-summer-iso-c-standards-meeting-toronto/ <comment><USER2> First job I had out of college was in C++ using CFront 1.3.

I'd really like to be able to use modules before I retire.

</comment><comment><USER3> Modules seem to be sidestepped. I wonder why is that, they would make the languages so much easier to work with. One reason is that they might involve a big overhaul of toolchains, I think...

<comment><USER4> Er, they submitted the TS to ISO for inclusion in the standard ("The Modules TS is sent out for its comment and approval (PDTS) ballot."). That's the final step from the committee for including it in C++20.

<comment><USER5> Not quite.

It was submitted for PDTS (proposed draft technical standard), which means it goes out for balloting to ISO national bodies. That balloting either succeeds (at which point you have a Techincal Specification) or it comes back to the committee with comments that the committee then has to respond to (and then another round of balloting happens). Once it's accepted as a Technical Specification, it's still not part of the C++ International Standard. That's a decision the committee comes to at their own pace, much like what happened at this meeting where the Concepts TS was accepted (as amended) into the IS.

Think of a TS somewhat like a beta. There's no assurance that the contents of the TS will go into the IS _at all_ or in the exact form it was originally specified in, but that's certainly the hope when the TS is published.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, we're going to get compile time reflection?

<comment><USER7> This is the proposal:

[http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2017/p019...](http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2017/p0194r4.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> :looks disappointedly for erowid link:

</comment><comment><USER9> Do they do any surveys on what percentage of the programmer population actually gives a damn about using C++ in new projects, what % plans to make their existing codebase even shittier (or complicated or subjectively beautiful or what have you) by using even more C++ features?

Like my question is who are these standards targeted to? How many of those people exist?

They should stop this nonsense by having one giant meeting and adding everybody's ideas to the standard. Then take a giant sigh and call it C++Done.

Edit: to the -I'm sure respectably intelligent- people with temporary lapses of objectivity that are downvoting without comments - HN is not for passive downvoting of things you don't like, it's for discussing why you disagree.

<comment><USER10> Nor is it the place for commenting on being downvoted.

C++ is still used widely, in many domains, and there's a lot of code out there that can benefit from incremental improvements to the language and the STL. As for who the standards are targeted to: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Adobe, Yahoo!, major financial institutions, game developers large and small alike, etc., etc. Microsoft claims that 1.5 million C++ devs use Visual Studio, so that's probably where the low estimate for the number of active/semi-active C++ developers would be.</comment></comment>


Writing Women Back into the History of Science - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/this-college-student-is-writing-women-back-into-the-history-of-science <comment><USER2> Love how she admits that she started everything after being a troll herself. Awesome, kind of speaks volumes I think.

In any regards, if she knows of scientists that should have wiki articles but don't or are otherwise faulty, and she spends time correcting those issues, great. No need to make it into a gendered issue though, that is just sexist.

<comment><USER3> That's absurd to say its sexist, the woman is a volunteer contributing to the vast store of human knowledge.

Documenting female scientists may be her agenda due to the intense amount of vitriol online, but from the article content's its pretty clear that her aim isnt sexist, just one that says that women werent written into the history books as often and as readily as men.

Also the troll thing is her very first article as a child, hardly relevant.

<comment><USER4> It is sexist by definition if she favors one sex over the other. If it produces something good (accurate knowledge), then I don't really see the problem...

The thing I would like to know is why she is getting so much hate. I could write articles about men scientists all year and nobody would notice.

EDIT: Went to see her handle on twitter and got my answer. She is on the left politically and is very open about it. Makes more sense now.

<comment><USER5> Nobody would notice because male scientists already get enough credit, the reason there is an article about this is because lots of women in science aren't given enough credit.

<comment><USER4> I could write about women scientists all year and nobody would notice either. That wasn't my point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> After reading about the gender gap between Wikipedia editors ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia)) I've been trying to encourage more of my female friends to become Wikipedia editors and this article will certainly help inspire. Great stuff!

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice to see this being quietly upvoted.

But the actual discussion thread is useless, which is not much of a surprise. It was always going to attract the type of people who are discussed in the article.</comment>


Show HN: The WordPress Query Generator, create WP loops in plain English - <AUTHOR> http://wpquerygenerator.com/

<comment><USER2> It's unfortunate that this is necessary. Other frameworks have normal iterators, the for loop, maybe a while loop as well. They just show items from the db. Simple. WP has somehow fetishized this simple affair into "The Loop"- 3 different functions, all with slightly different behavior and syntax, with about 40 arbitrary defaults each that must be overridden if you want basic, bare bones behavior. It's no surprise that WP is the only framework that needs an online generator for something that is usually so simple. I could get into "The Post" as well, but I'll leave that for another time.

<comment><USER3> While I agree that WP is an absolute mess, I want to remind you that this has been how WP has operated for _long_ before the vast majority of today's frameworks have existed.

WP isn't a framework. It's a CMS. A shitty one that needs to go away, but criticizing it for not having the same feature-set as modern frameworks is simply unfair and unnecessary.

<comment><USER4> While WordPress is a bit of a shitty CMS, all the other CMSes I've tried are even worse. Are there any actually good alternatives?

<comment><USER5> Wordpress is a code architectural mess, but as a CMS it's one of the best I've ever seen. (CMS's are deceptively complicated to build)

People saying it's shitty don't know what they are talking about (even you point out others you've tried are worse).

Wordpress is best in class for what it is: open source content manager. It's best use case is for a simple blog. It can be bashed into submission to be an ok general CMS or even a community managment solution. Past that though, it's architecture falls to pieces - but then, you wouldn't use a hammer to drill a hole would you?

<comment><USER6> The real difficulty in CMSs isn't in making the CMS, it's making a CMS that is reasonably extensible and configurable by end-users as well as coders.

Too far into that extreme gets into Drupal-land.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cute! Love the sentence-based construction.

This would be really strong if it allowed you to generate more complex queries. For instance, you can't select more than one post status, select a custom post type, or use meta fields as part of the query.

I get that it's meant to provide a nice starting point, but value for _me_ (and I get that I might not be a target) would be a natural language abstraction of the more complex queries.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey jwarren, we're working on making it more complex -- we wanted to get the MVP out for user feedback. We want to add things like support for multiples of the current criteria we have, as well as more advanced queries like custom fields and custom taxonomy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I could definitely see myself using something like this. It needs some more complex loops, but it's a great MVP. Cheers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We plan on adding support for things like custom fields and meta data soon, so stay tuned!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this is awesome. Obviously it's not geared towards intermediate or higher level WordPress developers, but for someone like my wife who is just digging into WordPress looping it's a wonderful learning tool.

</comment><comment><USER10> Great, however I can't help but think that 10minutes spent making the response AJAX would make the app much more user-friendly/responsive and easier to iterate through changes quickly.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is definitely doable -- we've put this in our to-do, thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> On Chrome I can't delete 'anyone', 'all' or 'any' from the text fields. I can only type new characters in front of the default text. On the initial load, 'anyone' is also cut off, looks like 'anyor'.

Other than that, this looks like a very nice site for a non-programmer or new programmer who wants to customize a theme they found.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey ChrisClark, these are placeholders, so you can type and they will clear out. We'll take this into consideration and maybe change the text color so it's a little more apparent. Dually noted about the cut off "anyone" -- thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not the greatest experience on iPad 2. Back on the desktop, it doesn't seem to clear values, only adds them (I'm playing with chaning posts, page, etc..)

Here's a good WP Query resource I've been using to structure marginally complex queries:

      https://gist.github.com/luetkemj/2023628

</comment><comment><USER13> Here is a library I wrote to make querying WordPress easier: <https://github.com/ramen/wp-find>

It has a more conventional builder-style API that may answer the complaints of those wishing for a more straightforward way to write loops.

<comment><AUTHOR> Neat, starred!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wrote a WordPress plugin that allows you to use the WP_Query class as an iterator:

<https://github.com/cmwelsh/zesty-wp-query>

</comment><comment><USER15> 'posts_per_page' => 'all' is not a valid value.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice catch -- fixed and pushed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I noticed the Wordpress theme Salient using this. It´s much easier for noobs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! Just checked out Salient, are you referring to the shortcode generator? I've never used the theme, just checking it out on Theme Forest.

<comment><USER16> Hey, I'm talking about Salient's way of handling the portfolio arrays are the same[0] as the one on this site.

[0] <http://themenectar.ticksy.com/ticket/46881>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Font is huge!

<comment><USER18> As it should be for this kind of thing.</comment></comment>


What the heck, HTML and CSS? - <AUTHOR> http://paulmolluzzo.github.io/wth-html-css/

<comment><AUTHOR> In case anyone wonders why this isn't a pull request and instead a published fork...

Obviously @mdo can write whatever he likes on his projects, and it doesn't feel right to "correct him" with a pull request if that's how he chose to write the resource.

In the original HN post[1] there were a couple of comments about how some people might want to share this with kids who are learning to code. If they want to share the knowledge without a couple of "bad words" spoiling it now they have a way.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7457132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7457132)</comment>


Ask HN: Your favorite web application design/UI? - <AUTHOR> I'm redesigning my web application — it's a SAAS app for project management — right now it looks too similar to Basecamp but I'm having trouble breaking out of the tabs-content-sidebar look.
I'm thinking of going with a totally different style.. inspired by http://www.alfredapp.com/
Big type, top-to-bottom, full screen.
What are some of your favorite web application user-interfaces + designs? <comment><USER2> Jason Santa Maria is the only designer whose rss feed I'm subscribed to. Check his porfolio for some projects you'll probably recognize.

<http://jasonsantamaria.com/>

<comment><USER3> I went to check his portfolio and noticed one of his works is dictionary.com - he lists it under website design. Not sure what happened but dictionary.com is an awful site!

<comment><USER4> I just went there. Seems pretty okay to me. If you mean those click-popups that drive everyone crazy, that's not the designer's fault.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While it created a lot of dissatisfied customers, I truly loved the redesign for <http://www.thesixtyone.com/> beautiful stuff.

<comment><USER6> Whoa! I hadn't been on the site in ages. The design is nuts! I think it's beautiful, yes, but much less functional.

<comment><USER7> When I first saw the redesign of TheSixtyOne, I also thought it was nuts; a classic case of web-design by graphic-designer.

But then I realized that it's an amazing solution to the problem they're trying to solve; discovering new music.

You're shown just one song (you've likely never heard of before) at a time.

You either like it and listen to it, or move on to the next.

You can't physically listen to more than one song at once, so you move everything to individual pages.

TheSixtyOne's design can be improved a bit, sure, but the overall concept is brilliant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know this isn't what you asked for, but it sounds like you are trying to find a design that you will wedge your content into. Let the content dictate the design.

</comment><comment><USER9> Love the Alfred app design. I bookmarked it when it first came out. It inspired me to do a very logo centric design for my web app:

<plug> <http://www.HobsonFiles.com> </plug>

So did <http://mailchimp.com>. I've always been impressed by how much personality their web app has while actually doing something very useful.

<comment><USER10> Re: HobsonFiles.com

Isn't that a bit wide of a design? I would think that the average person would have to scroll left and right to see it all. I did, at least, and it took me by surprise.

Edit: In reference to the landing page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like Quora and github. Nice clean designs.

</comment><comment><USER3> I find that most YC funded companies have great designs/UIs. Some that spring to mind are airbnb, hipmunk, etc.

Here is a list of YC funded companies (look on bottom left column under investments) - <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/y-combinator>

</comment><comment><USER12> <http://www.campaignmonitor.com/>

</comment><comment><USER13> <http://forrst.com/> & <http://carbonmade.com/> & <http://gowalla.com/>

</comment><comment><USER14> A couple of comments here have liquid card based layouts (<http://spacecollective.org/projects/The-Total-Library>, <http://alpha.patterntap.com/collections/Tabs>). To add to the list of this type of design check out <http://pinterest.com/>. That site does a great job in showing and discovering collections.

</comment><comment><USER15> <http://alpha.patterntap.com/collections/Tabs>

I always start at PatternTap.com when I'm stumped on a design solution.

</comment><comment><USER16> Redmine does a great job for a web application in being easy to use out of the box, while handling loads of data as well. With the amount of stuff it does, it could very easily be convoluted and spiteful to its users. Instead it's quite easy to use and logical in it's layout. It's not pretty, mind you, but it's functional.

</comment><comment><USER17> Not sure. But I think I am tired of the "Web 2.0 aesthetic" or whatever people are calling it these days. It's bland, boring, and done. Sometimes that is a good thing but it is almost just too cliche for me at this point. I don't hate it and don't think it's the worst decision to go that route, I'm just tired of it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Perhaps not appropriate for your app, but who knows, maybe? But this is my favorite UI that I've seen in a very long time. Just click on any of the content boxes.

<http://spacecollective.org/projects/The-Total-Library>

<comment><USER19> That site has one of my pet peeves. At the top, there is a Flash element. Wanting to see the full site design, I allowed Flash to run on the page. What did I see?

Text.

Just text.

At worst, it would have taken a PNG to produce the same thing, but they decided to create an entire Flash app devoted to displaying some text.

<comment><USER20> Actually I think this is one of those Flash-based font substitution tricks. Although I wonder why anyone would still use that now cufon is available...

<comment><USER21> Many (most?) commercial font licenses prohibit embedding fonts via Cufon or other non-Flash solutions.

Typekit, Fontdeck, etc. are helping to fix this problem, but it takes time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> <http://icontact.com> has a smart design

The first thing that hits you is a sliding list of benefits + social proof on each slide + prominent buttons for a free trial and a video tour.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm not a Rubyist, but 37signals' (clickable: <http://37signals.com/>) new design is really great to me. It's clean and extremely functional.

<comment><USER24> I'm confused, why would one need to be a Rubyist to appreciate 37signals' new home page design?

<comment><USER23> Isn't 37signals like Rubyist central?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> You might find some useful links in this thread... <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282024>

</comment><comment><USER6> I like the <http://invoicemachine.com> web app interface.

</comment><comment><USER26> Basecamp, Wufoo, Reddit (If you are not looking at Visual Design but Good Design)

<comment><USER27> I love Reddit, but I've never thought it was a good design.

<comment><USER26> It is not visually appealing but it has good user experience. You will hardly make any mistakes while using it. They concentrated more on making it clean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> if anyone is interested in the concept behind this thread, this was my intent for starting <http://reddit.com/r/prettywebsites> which is since out of date

</comment><comment><USER29> looks like the new 37signals homepage

</comment><comment><USER30> Clockspot.com

</comment><comment><USER31> Craigslist.

Take the 10+ billion web pages out there, zoom in on the top 100 by traffic, which one is _effectively_ used by the maximum number of people for non- trivial tasks?

Craigslist is at or among the very top of the list. I don't count Google, which is meta—they are a "portal" of the web. I discount Facebook for the same reason, as well as being 99.999% used for trivial tasks(teenagers sharing stupid photos, etc).

Think of web users as a strictly economical _force_ , and ask which web site has the most real-world impact? Craigslist is 99% about real-world money changing hands. Buyer, meet Seller. Google, Facebook, the Silicon Valley Bubble Chamber, and almost all the biggest web properties/brands on the web are _derivative_ products. Their value is based on the value of something else, or the value of a collection of something else.

I often wish Craiglist would add a simple counter to their site displaying a total value of good exchanged, similar to what many new sites show. Even if only a fraction of commercial exchanges could be tracked through some half- hacked manner, I bet that dollar amount would be a very large and surprising number.

Craigslist loses all design awards. This is true. It is an eternal relic enshrining HTML web design circa 1999, it has a hideous, redundant UI, it mercilessly makes users do too much work to sift and sort through what's out there, and provides no tools to lessen at least some of the work. And there's no way to extend or scale it it beyond doing individual, in-person transactions. Yet Craigslist blithely meanders on its merry way in 2010 without needing to partner or integrate with any other major web properties, any "Tech Coast" corps, any telecoms, nor are they beholden to Wall St in any way.

Name one other site that defeats this same set of constraints?

As for how this relates to design proper, the best _designs_ are those you don't even see, and which optimize some set of material constraints that you don't even know about.

<comment><USER17> Wouldn't ebay be closer to "99% about real-world money changing hands?" Craigslist is fine but isn't it more about sex and Nigerian scams? Not to dig too much at Craigslist but I don't think this gets to what the OP is asking about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> www.playmycam.com</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a outline-like tool that works like pi hole? - <AUTHOR> pi hole is great but lately I feel it's no longer enough.
Articles are becoming downright reader hostile. Half the page is covered by a cookie message and the a subscribe to newsletter overlay on top of that. And then when you scroll down a bit more another overlay pops up. It's a miserable UX experience.
Is there some sort of service / software / MITM to filter this out or make it more bearable? <comment><USER2> Reader mode?

<comment><USER3> So a reader-hole or pi-reader which "readerifies" urls on a blacklist?

<comment><USER2> I mean most browsers now have a "reader mode" that gives you a content-only view of an article.

<comment><USER3> I just meant taking reader mode in a browser, and implementing it as a prefetch by selenium or some similar browser logic to serve onward, through a whitelist: if you ask for full content it remembers and doesn't do it.

I use reader mode, what would be nice would be to have it sticky by site with a control panel. That's what a device on a pi could do, while it does adblock and DNS privacy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Huge number of Mac apps are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apple/2016/02/09/huge-number-of-mac-apps-are-vulnerable-to-man-in-the-middle-attacks/ <comment><USER2> It's caused by Sparkle's framework vulnerability.</comment>