Maybe we're in a bubble but it doesn't matter - <AUTHOR> http://justinkan.com/maybe-were-in-a-bubble-but-it-doesnt-matter <comment><USER3> Justin is fundamentally missing what people are saying the bubble is. From my perspective, no one is arguing that high tech and programming _won't_ be more and more important in the future.

"Anyone who tells you that you shouldn't be in tech, or that the current market situation will create an oversupply of people in tech, is doing you a massive disservice."

Who is saying this? I don't think _anyone_ is trying to dissuade people from getting high tech skills.

I believe that the bubble consists of the massive amount of startups that do not actually provide a valuable service. Do we really need another social network or sharing site or "X for Y"? No, we don't, but it seems like 90% of the startups getting funded by incubators are just rehashes of that.

I believe that point is explained very well here: [http://scripting.com/stories/2012/04/19/itsDefinitelyABubble...](http://scripting.com/stories/2012/04/19/itsDefinitelyABubble.html)

The key points are here:

</comment><comment>==

2\. We're bundling young people into things called startups, and selling them to investors for ever-increasing amounts of money.

3\. In an effort to bring more suckers in, they just passed a law that makes it legal to pimp these startups to people who don't know anything. You will be able to take their investment by swiping a credit card. Probably using a $4 billion valuation Square dongle for an iPhone.

4\. They have started incubators in every major city on the planet. Unfortunately it hasn't been stylish to learn how to program for a number of years, so there aren't that many programmers available to hire. And it takes years to get really good at this stuff.

5\. Even if they could find enough programmers, there aren't that many businesses to start to satisfy the demand for investment vehicles. A lot like the situation with mortgages in the last bubble. So the VCs and angels and no doubt some very shady folks are putting together deals with people who can't program with no actual idea for the business. Don't look to Y-Combinator, they're the quality act here. But there are incubators in every city from Santiago to Beirut.

</comment><comment>==

The most important sentence there is "A lot like the situation with mortgages in the last bubble. So the VCs and angels and no doubt some very shady folks are putting together deals with people who can't program with no actual idea for the business."

And that is the bubble. Startups being founded with people who can't program with no actual idea for the business. Just like the last mortgage bubble.

And to be fair to Justin, I think twitch.tv is great. It is novel, has a clear path to monetization, and provides a service that people actually want. We need more venues for professional gaming and twitch.tv is a great step in that direction.

<comment><USER4> I'm not a big fan of protecting people from themselves. Who are you to tell me I shouldn't be allowed to invest in a startup because I'm too dumb to make that decision for myself? Whether or not you are right about the bubble is besides the point.

<comment><USER5> Well, aside from well-meaning paternalism... everyone who overextended themselves with a too-large mortgage did it of their own free will and hypothetically were only screwing themselves. But when things go to shit, the effects of a large number of people screwing themselves spill over to a bunch of complete innocents (well, people who are innocent of everything except existing in our contemporary economy).

<comment><USER4> I agree with your observation but I still disagree with the conclusion that we should protect people from themselves for the simple reason that _people do not have a responsibility towards the economy_. If half Silicon Valley stops going to work tomorrow, the economy will unquestionably take a massive hit. Should we have a law preventing people from stopping going to work? If Zuckerberg decided not to build Facebook, should he be held accountable for all the jobs he could have created but did not?

<comment><USER5> In practice for this particular instance, I agree with you on the correct policy position: the amounts of real-world money that would be being put at risk are small compared to the real estate bubble, and the financial nervous centers of our economy are more insulated from this bubble than the one in 2008.

I do think your general principle for appropriate government action is too strong and leads to some questionable results, but that ends up getting too involved in abstract political principles for this particular thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's funny to look back at news articles when past bubbles were forming and compare it to the articles that are popping up now about startups. It's hard not to see similarities. Take this 2005 NYT times article, titled "Trading Places: Real Estate Instead of Dot-Coms", for instance (<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/25/business/25boom.html>):

'Premonitions of a bubble on the verge of popping do not ruffle those who are bullish on real estate. In Miami, Ron Shuffield, president of Esslinger- Wooten-Maxwell Realtors, predicted that a limited supply of land coupled with demand from baby boomers and foreigners would prolong the boom indefinitely. "South Florida," he said, "is working off of a totally new economic model than any of us have ever experienced in the past."'

It seems like a lot of the same kinds of thinking in Justin's article, "we might be in a bubble, but for you it doesn't matter. The reality of the world is that software, specifically Internet enabled software, is becoming a part of every business. Marc Andreessen said "software is eating the world," and by that he meant that as time goes on, every industry is becoming a software industry...You want to be in the tech game, because in time it will be the only game in town."

</comment><comment><USER7> When I read things like this, I have to wonder if the people saying it are really naive or sheltered enough to believe it:

"You want to be in the tech game, because in time it will be the only game in town."

Well, no...because tech won't be big enough to employ more than a relatively small percentage of the population. And it won't matter that companies want to pay tech workers to help automate people out of jobs. Because once everyone is unemployed, no amount of tech will keep a company in business if nobody is making enough to buy its products.

Without a doubt, things are going to change. Just like they always have. Some industries will gain, and some will lost. Some people will find their skills in high demand, and some will find their skills obsolete. We won't, however, end up in world where you either work in tech or you're unemployed.

<comment><USER8> It's an especially odd statement coming from the founder of a company that employs people to run errands for other people.

<comment><USER9> I guess my point was that I'd rather be the guy making the software that directs people around running errands then one of the guys running errands. To that end, I needed to have software engineering and product skills (otherwise I wouldn't have had the opportunity to even be in the position to start this company).

To the grandfather's point, I might be naive but when we automate away large numbers of people's jobs of course we will have to figure out some sort of wealth redistribution to give those people spending power (we do this right now in social welfare). However, my bet is that if you are one of the people doing the automating you'll be a lot better off than one of the people on welfare, because we've never in the history of humankind had perfect wealth redistribution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Another point to add to Justin's:

Few skillsets grant you more of an ability to be self-reliant than the ability to understand and write software -- even if there's no job description written for what you do, or no company who will hire you. In almost any field of entrepreneurship, if you have tech savvy which your competitors don't, you have an inherent advantage against them and an ability to crack open the market.

Are you a DJ or party promoter who understands SEO/SEM and social media? You've got a leg up. Are you the only person in your area who understands both fashion apparel supply chains and software? You could be providing immense value.

<comment><USER11> I don't think knowing how to write software is needed to understand SEO/SEM

<comment><USER10> True. I could have been more careful with my phrasing.

The original point, stated differently:

Understanding software and the modern web -- even short of being able to write it -- can still give someone a sizeable advantage in many fields.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Most people aren't self aware enough to realize what is happening that is > making their jobs disappear: a strong trend in software automation to make > business processes more efficient.

This reminds me of a really helpful salesperson at the Apple store that was really excited/proud to tell me that you can now walk in and purchase an item without ever talking to a salesperson...

<comment><USER13> I'm guessing he was excited because he knew very well that the majority of people at an Apple store have no idea what they really want to buy and need the salesperson's expertise. Probably the same reason that BestBuy hasn't been killed by Amazon yet.

<comment><USER12> Right, I truly think it was genuine pride for the excellent addition of technology to the process. The guy rocked, but the point remains - <USER2> addition he's excited about will likely result in frictional unemployment in his particular position.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article conflates two issues: the secular trend that is "software eating the world" and the local trend which is a valuation spike.

» _The truth is that the technology sector as a whole over any length of time is a positive-sum game_

Actually, no - a bubble means people aren't investing on fundamentals but on momentum; the expected value of the investment is negative. If we were in a bubble (as in bubbles past) we wouldn't be in a positive sum game. Saying that it would be a net positive game over "any period of time" is economically and empirically ridiculous.

I happen to believe that we are not in a bubble. But if we were it would matter - it would mean that when the bubble pops opportunities in the field would decrease in frequency and magnitude. Since career scars early on have more persistent effects than displacements later in life it follows that an aspiring tech star cannot ignore the market realities of what they're going into.

We are mortal, we can't just ride the secular trend. The local time scale matters, too.

</comment><comment><USER15> > News sites with a better grasp of how the Internet works, like HuffPo or > Mashable, are worth hundreds of millions.

I've been wondering - when all the old media inevitably die off, where are these aggregators going to find their content?

<comment><USER16> Most articles you see in traditional papers are not original. We're going from offline news aggregators to online news aggregators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The first thing you have to do to understand why bubbles happen is to stop believing everyone in it is being 100% rational.

The reality is that for most investors the vague notion that they might be missing a great opportunity far outweights any well documented evidence that they are walking into a sinkhole.

Many investors from the dotcom bubble simply left the market and new ones took their places. If there's money to be made some people will always be there, it doesn't gets more complex than that.

So basically you shouldn't stay out of tech right now just like you shouldn't stay out of tech in 1998. You should've done that in 2001 when everything started to collapse. Funny that Justin mentions Amazon because that company took a nosedive back then.

Question is, how long we have until the next 2001?

When that happens many people, including "negationists" and wantrepreneurs will GTFO from tech as fast as they can rip the copper wire from their office walls.

</comment><comment><USER18> Theres just so little value in the stuff being produced. Its absurd.

Where are the people who are designing actual tangible items?

Why is so much of this stuff only fluff and entertainment?

<comment><USER19> Because the parts of the economy providing food and housing take up a small fraction of the total work available to be done. The rest of the work (ie surplus) can go to one of three things:

1\. "Storing food for the winter". R&D to prepare us for challenges we'll face in the future. Ex: alternative energy research. This sort of thing is extremely difficult to fund in a capitalist society. We need more of it.

2\. Waste. Accounting and lawyering and sales and such.

3\. Entertainment. Everything from movies to luxury goods.

If given a choice between 2 and 3, I'd pick 3 any day. I'd like for there to be more of 1, but I guess that makes me a socialist :).

I don't see any functional difference between a Farmville cow and a ceramic cow that sits on a mantlepiece. They have exactly the same practical use, but one cost way more energy to produce than the other. My argument for how Farmville will save us from global warming is a post for another time.

tl;dr: Value is what the market says it is, not what you say it is.

See also: [http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2011/12/12/let_them_eat_...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2011/12/12/let_them_eat_food_preparation_jobs.html)

<comment><USER20> Accounting and practicing law is a waste?

<comment><USER19> Have you ever met an accountant that gets up in the morning excited to get to accoutning? Have you ever heard someone say: "Today is my lucky day! I get to go see my accountant!"?

I'm not saying they're not necessary. But if the economy were a mechanical system, law and accounting would be the friction between the belts and the wheels that produces waste heat.

<comment><USER21> This may sound crazy, but there are people drawn to accounting or insurance who are simply numerate, who love numbers and precision and carefully designing rules that accomodate the fascinating special cases of the real world, and who do enjoy that kind of work. It sounds dreary and gray, and we like to scoff at it as bean-counting, but it does appeal to a certain detail- oriented mindset that isn't all that far off from some forms of engineering.

Here's another view: Accounting is the instrumentation that lets you make sure the machine (the business) stays calibrated, and that the inputs match up to the outputs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> On the other hand, there might come a time where software becomes so important and pervasive that it won't make sense anymore to call yourself a software engineer or a software company. I'm guessing there was once a time where the next big thing was to become a mathematician. However, mathematics has grown so central to so many fields that very few people nowadays call themselves mathematicians or dream of building mathematics companies. I wonder if programming will not simply become an increasingly important tool within other disciplines or if everyone is really just going to start studying CS/software engineering. This is probably more an argument on semantics than a rebuttal.

<comment><USER22> I completely agree with this post, soon people are going to open their eyes and programming will be taught from elementary school to high school. Not being able to program will be equivalent to what being illiterate was.

<comment><USER23> I agree, but I'll point out that programming has been part of the curriculum in this locality since at least the time my dad was in high school. He tells of writing programs on punch cards. We started with BASIC when I was in elementary school.

Despite that, I don't know of anyone who I went to school with that could write a single line of code today. Of them, I do have one friend who is also in the software business, but his skills lie in other area of production. He admits he cannot program.

For your vision to come true, programming will have to become much more fundamental, to the point that something else will have to be cut. Which other subject should get the axe?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I thought I would add some support for the argument of choosing the tech sector as a career. If you look at the statistics it seems that 5 out of the top 10 jobs of 2012 according to this survey is in the tech sector with software development being number 2. And the estimations for the coming years are pretty staggering. Tech is probably not a bad field to be in, lucky me, I think. [http://money.usnews.com/careers/best- jobs/rankings/the-25-be...](http://money.usnews.com/careers/best- jobs/rankings/the-25-best-jobs)

</comment><comment><USER25> Really insightful article, especially for someone like me: a EE/CE student wondering about whether or not the current trends in tech jobs will continue into the future. I know I can get a job when I graduate in either hardware or software design, but I've been uncertain as to how quickly the industry will saturate and whether or not jobs will still be around (or pay well enough to be satisfied with the additional educational investment) in 5-10 years. Glad to see some insightful, well-informed confidence in the future of the industry.

</comment><comment><USER26> Software is indeed eating the world. What's going to devour it?

HARDWARE + SOFTWARE.

think nest, tesla (yes, it's a huge software play), and the like.

</comment><comment><USER16> I agree 100% with the article, but to me it disagrees with the headline. He's arguing that we shouldn't worry because we're not, in fact, in a bubble.

</comment><comment><USER27> proof positive we're in a bubble: <http://wag.com/>. <http://pets.com/> is back!

<comment><USER28> Wag.com (and soap.com, diapers.com, etc) are wholly-owned, very profitable subsidiaries of Amazon.</comment></comment>


Deepwater Horizon Dispersants Backfired - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/11/oops-deepwater-horizon-dispersants-backfired/414846/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> This is, unfortunately, quite well-known in the oil spill management community. We've chosen to measure incident response using visible oil on the surface of the water, so the companies use a method which reduces that metric but causes exponentially more environmental damage throughout the water column.

<comment><USER3> Honestly not being pedantic, what do you mean by "exponentially" in this case? Usually it implies a rate of growth though some people, increasingly, seem to use it just to mean "a lot".

<comment><USER2> Fair point, it's somewhat hyperbolic phrasing. A perhaps somewhat retroactive defence:

Surface contamination is deadly, particularly to bird/shore life, but dispersed oil is deadly throughout the water column (until it resurfaces, at which point it becomes deadly to birds again). There's relatively little life at the surface compared to the pelagic zone, so the impact of dispersants doesn't merely multiply the effect of the oil by the depth of the water, but actually moves that oil into the regions where life is densest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The dispersants did exactly what BP wanted them to do: obscure the environmental damage caused by the blowout.

<comment><USER5> To play devil's advocate, the dispersant contained the damage to low-impact areas (the deepwater ocean) and away from high-impact areas like beaches and shallow-water fisheries.

<comment><USER6> Can you fix your post? Low impact should be low visibility and high impact should be high visibility.

<comment><USER7> He was playing DEVIL's advocate

<comment><USER6> Still requires you to be accurate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Corexit dealt effectively with BP's PR problem. Oil soaked birds and beaches bring lawsuits and lower share prices.

It was never intended to solve the ecological problem they created.

<comment><USER9> If you tried to come up with the name of a product like that for a comic book about some evil megacorp, it would be hard to do better than "Corexit".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This thread is full of hindsight bias. The EPA defended the use of dispersants at the time: [http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation- world/national/articl...](http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation- world/national/article24589243.html)

"The EPA said Monday those dispersants hastened the decomposition of the oil, a process that may also have kept vast quantities of oil from fouling the shoreline."

Most of the concern was about the specific dispersant used, and if it might be toxic to marine life. But in general everyone thought dispersants would be effective. And it's been standard practice for cleaning up oil spills.

<comment><USER2> Preauthorization for use of dispersants had already been withdrawn for Prince William Sound (the only zone in Alaska where they had been preauthorized) by the Department of the Interior in 2008 following this consensus report: [http://dels.nas.edu/Report/Spill-Dispersants-Efficacy- Effect...](http://dels.nas.edu/Report/Spill-Dispersants-Efficacy- Effects/11283)

This is also an interesting and well-known report discussing the non- mechanical response to the Valdez spill from 2006: [http://www.pwsrcac.org/wp- content/uploads/filebase/programs/...](http://www.pwsrcac.org/wp- content/uploads/filebase/programs/oil_spill_response_operations/Report%20on%20the%20Non- Mechanical%20Response%20for%20the%20Exxon%20Valdez%20Oil%20Spill.pdf)

I can't be clear enough on this -- the impact of dispersants on the environment and their lack of efficacy at actually decomposing oil (see: resurfacing) was well-known at the time of the Deepwater Horizon spill. There's ample discussion from the actual professionals in this field at the time of the incident regarding the obviously inadequate cleanup process. The responses from both BP and the EPA were meant to reduce metrics like visible sheen while ignoring the environment (it's even worse in the gulf since current variation at depth results in a much broader resurfacing pattern than simply leaving the oil on the surface would have done).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm alawys amazed at how much of our ecosystem is powered—and regulated—by microbial activity. And yet we still have so much to learn about these organisms and their effects.

</comment><comment><USER12> Serious question: Why instead of dispersant (another chemical contaminant) did we not disperse large quantities of lab-grown oil digesting bacteria?

<comment><USER13> The USGC is already home to large quantities of oil digesting bacteria, and that is largely why the ecosystem has recovered to the extent it has.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Shrug, the environment was ultra-fucked as soon as that platform exploded. The question is whether it would have been destroyed even worse (and it was completely destroyed, and has not recovered to this day) without the use of dispersants. Given the level of ecosystem collapse we've seen (total), I think that's an open question.

<comment><USER15> Not to minize the damage, but "completely destroyed" and "total" collapse are exaggerations.

"The spill was certainly dramatic, but the long-term toll on wildlife has been mixed; some species in the Gulf are struggling while others are doing fine. Instead of a dramatic collapse of life, researchers are finding subtle effects — some that only emerged three or four years after the spill — that they are still trying to sort out, says coastal ecosystem scientist R. Eugene Turner of Louisiana State." [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/five-years-deepwater- hor...](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/five-years-deepwater-horizon-oil- spills-impact-lingers)</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Asking users to pay for new features - <AUTHOR>

You have an application with many happy users, but they're asking for more functionality.<p>How about a donate button to add on individual features? This allows the site to remain free and open to everyone while still collecting revenue in addition to advertisements. <comment><USER2> I'm sorry, but I'm not sure I understand.

1\. You have a working app that people like.

2\. You have a set of new features that are being requested by some users.

Seems to me that the obvious solution is to bundle all of these new features, create a "premium account", and charge a monthly fee to those who wish to upgrade.

Voila!

</comment><comment><USER3> The problem is that many features are going to cost more than one user could reasonably donate, and a lot of others are interrelated.

If you're set on this idea, I'd recommend looking into the Street Performer Protocol, which basically says that people pay for feature X.. If it's not implemented, they all get their money back.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Performer_Protocol>

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant allow all the users to contribute to creating a single feature. If you had 50k users and needed 5g 10% of users only have to give $10 to reach the goal.

<comment><USER3> SPP is the right way to do that.

The problem comes in that users will look at it and say "What if only 200 of the 400 people donate? Then I wasted my money.."

SPP basically promises that they'll get the money back, if they don't reach the threshold. If only 200 people donate, then I'll refund everyone, and no harm done.

The other alternative is taking "Pledges" and only collecting once you have enough to make it worthwhile, but I recommend against this. The problem is that if it takes a while, people might forget they agreed, or might not come back, etc.

One final alternative is to collect their credit card information and pledge number, but only charge them if you hit the threshold for implementing the feature. There is then a risk they might forget and chargeback, or their card might expire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the backpack model is the way to go. Everybody can get free access, but there are some arbitrary limits. Pay $5/mo or year and those limits go away. Also, there's no reason to disturb existing customers. Never never, take anything away that you've given people for free. If you feel your new feature isn't the thing to limit, be sure to roll your existing users into a special $0/month premium account. just ask new people to pay.

</comment><comment><USER5> What would you do if you had users but they weren't requesting any new functionality? Do you have your own plans for what you want to add or would you start working on something else? Also, how do you know your users are happy?

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://micropledge.com>

</comment><comment><USER7> how about you just make it and then try to make money off of it :)</comment>


The Best Word Your Customers Will Ever Hear - <AUTHOR> http://techneur.com/post/520136880/best-customer-word

<comment><USER2> Be careful. There is a very fine line past which repetition of my name feels condescending to me. Customer support representatives, particularly those that are clearly outside of the US, go way past this line every time.

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely agree. I just wrote that to illustrate my point that the reason they do this is to build rapport. Of course, too much of a good thing is bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This must depend on the application. On most sites requiring a name feild, I just type gibberish. I'd much rather be greeted by my username.

</comment><comment><USER4> Every CRM system I have ever seen has a "nickname" field, going all the way back to ACT! for DOS.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wish they would use them more frequently.</comment></comment>


HN sale: hacki.ng make me an offer - <AUTHOR>

I need to hock hacki.ng. Make me an offer, a reasonable one. My aging dev machine needs a worthy successor. Thanks <comment><USER2> ~ $1500 seems a bit steep for a domain name, no?

<comment><USER3> Not really, I'd say that particular domain would be somewhat lucrative to own and therefor be quite expensive.</comment></comment>


Show HN: MemStash - Commit things to memory - <AUTHOR> http://memstash.co <comment><USER2> In a similar vein, try out the space repetition software, Mnenmosyne: <http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/>

I'll add to that a good article spaced repetition: <http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition>

<comment><USER3> Also, Anki: <http://ankisrs.net/>

<comment><USER4> I just skimmed Anki & mnemosyne as well as MemStash. Early constructive criticism: I think all of these tools would benefit from a web-based demo that doesn't require a download & install or a signup / login.

As an example, I watched the Anki intro video <http://youtu.be/c0dI2VyLDWw> and I found myself wanting to try my hand at state capitals immediately, but not enough to download and install the software.

Building a quick web playground that lets the user try quick quizzes may capture people and hook them in -- at least it would for me.

<comment><USER5> I'm trying to start a startup to make spaced repetition easier to use, without logins or downloads. My prototype is <http://mrflashcard.com/> . Would something like this be more useful to you?

<comment><USER6> As a long time SRS user, I couldn't understand the flow of the US capitals example at all. Using Chrome/Linux, I only had one answer to begin with, and that was really confusing. The gradual multiple choice didn't make much sense for me, and it won't make much sense for language. With language, I just want to click on it and see if I was correct with my verbal guess.

I don't like the waiting for ten seconds for a new flashcard at all. Why am I staring at your screen for ten seconds? or a minute! I'm just going to leave and not return.

I personally have no interest in SMS, but others may. What I care about is push notifications and mobile software. (I paid the $$$ for anki, but it doesn't have a way to remind me to go through my cards daily.

Honestly, I think for this kind of startup, you'd be well served to read more of the research of learning, because what I see doesn't match up with what I've personally learned on my journey.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for your feedback.

You're right, the one card at the beginning is confusing; I plan on showing more at the onset to counter that.

I was hoping users would click the "show more cards" button when they got to the waiting screen, not actually wait 10 seconds. I should probably add some help text to encourage clicking this button.

The reason I'm experimenting with multiple choice over just asking "Did you get it right or wrong" is to make for a more casual learning experience. After a few days a card turns into typed answer so the user can prove to themselves that they still know it. I am considering adding a traditional flip and self score mode to accommodate users who want that.

My plan is to make a native app with Notifications; the SMS thing is just a temporary way to get the deck onto the phone since there's no login system yet.

If you have time, I'd love to pick your brain as to how you learn. If you do, shoot me an email: firstname.lastname@example.com . Thanks again!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As someone who is intensely interested in memory and mnemonics, I always welcome new tools. The site looks great for being build in 24 hrs and I like the idea of a web-based tool for memorization. However, I do think the offer could use some work. As some other people have pointed out, SMS, email and Push notifications might get out of hand very quickly.

I think you have to consider that most people are using tools like Anki to memorize larger sets of data rather than the names of a few people or a nice quote. Tools like push notifications and text messages are just not an efficient way to digest that much information. I wouldn't mind getting a quote pushed out to me a few times in a day, but compound that by 100 or more items to memorize and suddenly your phone is blowing up every 3 seconds. No bueno.

If I were in your shoes, I would do away with the push, email and SMS notifications altogether. I like the idea of clipping items from around the web, because that actually solves one of the biggest pains of using Anki, which is organizing and typing all your items into the program (assuming there isn't already a stack available). You could even allow users to "clip" to a specific notebook to better organize their items.

Instead of sending notifications, I'd create a spaced-repetition mobile app and/or web app that allowed users to access their clipped items. That way, users can access your tool at their own discretion, but still get the benefit of having a tool to gather their information.

Anyhow, that's my 2 cents. Great job and good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, really our main constraint was the 24 hours, and getting this to MVP stage. Really interested in getting more feedback though. If you take a look at the comments under [http://lesswrong.com/lw/e26/who_wants_to_start_an_important_...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/e26/who_wants_to_start_an_important_startup/) with my username and you can read a little about how this kinda developed. We're still trying to figure out whether there's a compelling and sticky feature set that we can build a meaningful, mainstream service around.

<comment><USER7> I think there is potential here. As I mentioned above, Anki has a few quirks that make it cumbersome to use on occasion. My top three complaints, accompanied by potential solutions, would be as follows:

01\. Getting information into Anki. You've already got this covered pretty well. The ability to clip notes from around the web or add them via other methods is wonderful. Think of a tool like Evernote or Clip.to

02\. Poor Quality Decks. Let's face it, finding a good pre-made deck in Anki can be a challenge. You can easily solve this, simply offer your users a variety of high quality decks. The better the quality of the decks, the more value. It can take a REALLY long time to make a good deck, I'd gladly pay a modest fee for a well made deck that saves me hours of prep time.

03\. Bad Design & UI. I love Anki, but she isn't the prettiest girl in the room and she isn't always easy to get along with. A little bit of elegant design and thoughtful UI would go a looong way in boosting the perceived value of your product.

<comment><USER8> 01\. Totally agree with this. I hate the inertia to adding new info.

02\. The best decks are always the ones you create, since they have personal value.

03\. Ankidroid is the OSS android version and it's awesome. I bought the paid iOS app to support the author/service, but IMO it's really ugly and unusable (but then I think most iOS apps are unintuitive and crippled so take it with a grain of salt)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is marvelous idea! I forget _everything_.

But, I have to ask, how do you stop yourselves from becoming annoying? Also, the fact that 90% of the time these aren't reminders, but distractions.

Also, I don't have a phone plan. Just an iphone that's used as a wifi device. Now what?

<comment><USER10> > Also, I don't have a phone plan. Just an iphone that's used as a wifi > device. Now what?

<https://voice.google.com>

<comment><USER11> I think that this relies on specific timing for receiving the messages though, so if the phone is not constantly on wifi you miss a part of it.

<comment><USER12> the timing isn't precise to more than perhaps +-1 day, missing that particular couple minutes when the text would arrive doesn't matter

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love seeing things built in 24 hours. Great job on that.

The idea is so-so. There is probably a low upper-limit to the number of things you want to remember this way. More than 5 text messages like this a day will get a bit annoying I think.

Take a look at memrise.com. They see to have the learning things through repetition thing down.

Great job though, and keep working on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, Memrise is awesome. We think that spaced repetition has the potential to be more mainstream ... it's quite an empowering use of technology, and there are lots of similar cognitive enhancing tricks that are in the same vein. You're right - more than 5 text messages isn't great, but down the line we're hoping to create mobile apps to make the reminder process much more streamlined.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you want to commit something to memory, read it, try reciting it in your head, try writing out, and as long as you can't, refer back to the original thing.

If you want to record a passing thing to later commit to memory, write it in a notebook.

<comment><USER15> Following tactics can also aid the learning process:

1\. Associate new ideas to existing ideas (metaphors, problem solve, story)

2\. Make it less abstract (story, diagrams, touch, smell, etc)

3\. Express it (restate, teach, share, tweet, blog, etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> _Whether your learning a foreign language_

In the front page, it's "you're"

<comment><USER17> I'm going to blame that on 24 hours of no sleep too. We'll get it fixed write away ;)

<comment><USER18> I see what you did there

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Feedback in the form of questions: Why not build this as a local app? Isn't this effectively the same thing as setting a few calendar reminders? Once I've identified something I'd like to remember, how is this faster, cheaper, or more effective than using, say, Evernote?

</comment><comment><USER20> I want to just have it email and I'd like to remove my phone #, can't seem to figure out how.

Also a similar type thing but without the push that I've been using to learn languages (and is very slick) is <http://www.memrise.com>

</comment><comment><USER21> So, is this based around a Spaced Repetition system, or just some standardly spaced reminders? Would this be an alternative to Anki? Or is it just meant to solidify some small set of facts using reminders?

<comment><AUTHOR> You know, our plan is to eventually make this Anki-as-a-service. It's dumbed- down spaced repetition as it stands, but the long-term vision is to try and make a more mass-market friendly Anki. It's all pretty basic since we built this thing in 24 hours ... but hopefully more to come soon.

<comment><USER21> Sounds like a good plan, SRS is definitely under-used for how powerful it can be as a memory tool, so it's good to see some more development in the space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hey everybody, we just built this webapp at the techcrunch disrupt hackathon. It's a little rough around the edges but we're just looking to get some feedback from the HN community. Thanks!

<comment><USER23> Wonderful idea. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love it. Instead of MMS though, reminders via instant message (gchat/aim/whatever) would be nice.

<comment><USER17> Great idea! on the list now

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is a great example of the concept that ideas are worthless and it's execution that is everything. I've been thinking of doing _exactly_ the same service for some.. 2 years now, mostly for myself by potentially also for the benefit of others. And voila :)

Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER26> Sounds very useful and I want to try this but the sign up requires the use of a cell phone. I'm afraid this will not work here in the Netherlands, is this correct?

If this is so, could you make an app or use WhatsApp or e-mail or whatever so I can try?

<comment><AUTHOR> Try entering 999-999-9999. At the moment SMS is disabled while we're waiting for Twilio API approval, but email should work!

Edit: We'll also try and make phone optional in the next hour or so ...

<comment><USER27> Happy to help here! Please email me.

Edit: Found an account for you and for BC, approved both. Let us know if we can do anything else to help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Save for SMS and email reminders, this looks remarkably similar to a site I built a while ago called FlashcardStash (<http://flashcardstash.com>) (used to be WordStash).

</comment><comment><USER29> Very cool job getting this to number 1 in real-time for your demo presentation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that was ridiculously awesome! Just in time :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This website doesn't do well on high resolutions.

Good: <http://wsld.me/JK0p>

Bad: <http://wsld.me/JJsc>

<comment><USER22> yeah, sorry. we've only had my 13' macbook air and we made this over the last 24 hours. I'll be fixing the responsive design once I get some sleep, heh.

<comment><USER30> No worries! Sorry if my comment sounded super negative, I wrote it real fast while running off to make dinner so it was short and blunt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Hi,

I live in canada and can't seem to get sms. I tried my area code with 438 with both 438 and 1438 and they both don't seem to work. I don't receive sms notifications

</comment><comment><USER32> A neat idea, but three times is definitely not going to be enough reminders in many cases, especially if you are using the service often.

</comment><comment><USER17> Thank you to everyone pointing out the spelling mistakes - and i mean that seriously - HN is the best QA team we could ask for!

</comment><comment><USER33> Sounds like Git hehe. Stash, Commit etc.

</comment><comment><USER34> The service is not for me, but just wanted to say it's a beautifully executed responsive homepage.

</comment><comment><USER35> What is the timing scheme for the notifications? Do you have any information about its efficacy?

<comment><USER17> Right now its 10 min after book marking it, then 24 hours after that. We had some different schemes in mind that we'll be optimizing in the next day or so. It's a hackathon, build what you need now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Love the concept and that page shrinks beautifully.

Small typo: Every forgotten somebody's name? should be Ever.

<comment><USER22> Thanks! Still a few issues with the site responsiveness that I'll need to sort out - at least once I get some sleep!

And I'll get that typo sorted out, heh.

<comment><USER37> I feel I should point out that the header in the mast container has white text and on my browser, with a window size width greater than 1600 px, it overlaps with the white in the image making part of it hard to read. Other than that, job well done :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Well done guys, great achievement for a 24hr project! Even has Evernote integration, neat.

</comment><comment><USER39> Any tips on making a bookmarklet work this well? I mean code-wise and ease of testing

</comment><comment><USER40> Am I the only one that thought this was another Redis from reading the title?

</comment><comment><USER41> Looks like the bookmarklet code was copied from Instapaper.

</comment><comment><USER42> Every forgotten? Embarrassing is misspelled, too.

<comment><USER17> fixed, thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Stash this: "Remember to sign up to Memstash" :)

</comment><comment><USER44> not a criticism, just noticed this looks like rdio's landing page. glad to see someone else liked theirs as much as i do

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep we totally "drew inspiration" from Rdio. Good catch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Really? Are we still using bookmarks for app executions? I personally find terrible UX to mix real bookmarks with your extensions/apps

<comment><USER22> any suggestions for better implementation? we're for sure looking for ways to improve.</comment></comment>


MIT creates robot fish - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/08/31/robotic.fish.mit/index.html

<comment><USER2> Imagine catching one of these on your line! Also imagine the scientists surprise when their robot gets eaten by an endangered shark. What do you do then?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is quite possibly the coolest application of robotics, ever!</comment>


Ask HN: How do GMail/Facebook serve good context sensitive ads? - <AUTHOR>

I figured that since a lot of people responsible for these systems read HN regularly, and I haven't got any satisfactory replies on StackOverflow, so I should ask this here.
GMail serves some really good ads on the column on the right of the email text. Same goes for Facebook. The ads which I see on Facebook are often (very) relevant to what interests me. Obviously they preprocess the information available to them. They have a lot of user specific information available to them. So I would imagine they preprocess all of it, before generating any ad recommendations.
Does anyone know of what specific algorithms/technique do those systems use? Thanks. <comment><USER2> In case you haven't done this yet, one way to gather some insight as to how they are targeting their ads is to take a look at the ad buying pages for the respective sites. In the past (it may have changed) Google AdWords were solely based on keyword targets - that tells you they are probably processing text on the page rather than pulling from any user database they may have. Facebook, on the other hand, basically gives advertisers their pick of profile information, to a surprising degree of accuracy (eg. friends of people who like X band) - it is pretty obvious how they might provide that level of accuracy based on the data available to them.

</comment><comment><USER3> While I can't speak for the specific algorithms they use, you pretty much hit the nail on the head of how they determine what ads to use. GMail is a little different in that Google knows a lot about you in terms of the content of the email and what your current conversations contain, they can then drive specific ads based on those conversations.

Facebook knows who you are, your age, your location, what you like, possibly what you dislike, your music tastes, movies, etc... They know who you interact with the most, who you interact with the least and can form patterns of what common interests between you and your friends. They combine all this data to determine what kind of ads will most likely appeal to you. The more you interact with Facebook, the more relevant the ads displayed to you will become.

Not sure exactly what else you are looking for here though based on your question. The specific algorithms/techniques they use are proprietary to them and what makes their technology worth the money advertisers will pay (along with the number of users on the platform) to place their ads in front of their users.</comment>


Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-sagemaker-ground-truth-build-highly-accurate-datasets-and-reduce-labeling-costs-by-up-to-70/ <comment><USER2> I love things like this. It's beautifully recursive in a way: AWS sees a lot of machine learning, AWS adopts tools to help people do it, people see training data problems, AWS has some machine learning expertise and realizes that they can help you auto-label your dataset.</comment>


Asynchronous Ratcheting Tree: Group Messaging with Strong Security Guarantees - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/facebookresearch/asynchronousratchetingtree <comment><USER2> The paper makes the Diffie-Hellman tree they use pretty easy to grok: [https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/666.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/666.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> For those interested in ART, there is an IETF working group attempting to standardise it as the "Messaging Layer Security" protocol. Their website [1] has a draft protocol document [2] which explains the ART scheme from a concrete engineering perspective, which I find easier to follow than the original ART paper.

[1]: [https://mlswg.github.io/](https://mlswg.github.io/)

[2]: [https://github.com/mlswg/mls-protocol/blob/master/draft- ietf...](https://github.com/mlswg/mls-protocol/blob/master/draft-ietf-mls- protocol.md)

<comment><USER4> [https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/mls/vskNqxGlJCKql0UsDK...](https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/mls/vskNqxGlJCKql0UsDK8ZpprcEj0)

> At the interim last week, there was agreement to remove the discussion of > ART from the protocol draft and focus on TreeKEM.</comment></comment>


Why Americans Won't Do Dirty Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/printer/magazine/why-americans-wont-do-dirty-jobs-11092011.html

<comment><USER2> I can't believe this guy actually doesn't know what his problem is. The overwhelming majority of Americans don't want to deal with fish guts for minimum wage and no benefits. If you offer below market wages, you'll attract people willing to work below market. Supply and demand. Oldest rule in economics.</comment>


Ask HN: Web app stack from scratch what technologies would you choose? - <AUTHOR> Hey there, I am doing research into choosing a productive technology stack for a new product. It's a web application.
I have mostly been doing go microservices and react UIs but the complexity of microservices and writing our own code for things that are not in our core domain such as identity/authn/authz or writing code for various communication layers just to do simple CRUD makes development very slow and expensive.
So what would you choose for a modern productive web app stack? <comment><USER2> It kind of depends how big this is going to get. I'm using Java/Spring/Thymeleaf right now for an "enterprise" project but that has certain considerations: it may have a 20+ year long lifespan, it may in the future have to be worked on by inexperienced developers. So Java is a nice choice because it pretty much forces you to write self-documenting OO code. Spring Boot is good here because it has default implementations for practically everything (login, security, etc) and you don't have to write custom code that someone will have to maintain. But it has a fairly long learning curve.

On the other hand I've used Python/Flask in previous projects and that's nice because it's quick and easy. If you just want to write a few CRUD methods/endpoints that are a thin web veneer on top of your database, and it's for use by a small group of users, that's much more "productive". Quick to learn and start, and then you can add more functionality (like authentication) on incrementally when you need them.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://apollokit.org](https://apollokit.org)</comment>


My name is cleared - <AUTHOR> http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/my-name-is-cleared/

<comment><USER2> Sounds like Google noticing people actually read your blog and now playing a game of CYA (cover your ass).

Some tech managers can be horrible people though, because some of them, (definitely not all, or even most) take their promotion to mean they're the next coming of Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg and are now allowed to step all over, manipulate, and lie to whoever works under them to get ahead.

I've worked for guys like this and management turns a blind eye to it because they too start to buy into that manager's fantasy.

Good on you for both pointing this bad guy out and getting a public apology from the company Michael.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm aware of the fallout from the Michael Church Google Saga - it prompted him to write lots of fun and interesting things here and elsewhere.

No idea about the saga _itself_ however, anybody care to sum up what specifically the high ranking googler is apologizing for?

</comment><comment><USER4> Congratulations. Any word on what they plan to do to prevent anyone else from being Churched in the future?

I know that in previous threads where employee evaluation and management has been discussed that there have been some pretty good ideas suggested.

<comment><USER5> I think michaelochurch was pushing for open allocation.</comment></comment>


Reinforcement Learning Progress - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samaltman.com/reinforcement-learning-progress <comment><USER2> _> ...and a really good simulated environment that captures the problem you're solving._

The original "data is the new oil" quote was pointing out that raw data, like raw oil, requires lots of processing/refinement before the raw resource becomes something with a lot of economic value and potential [1].

In that sense, simulated environments are the oil of deep RL.

Deep RL has a lot of promise (and obv is already delivering on that promise). But when it comes to the need for high-fidelity and accurate models, we're out of the frying pan and into the fire.

[1] [https://medium.com/@TalPerry/on-labeled- data-85fbaf1bdf89](https://medium.com/@TalPerry/on-labeled-data-85fbaf1bdf89)</comment>


You don't really think that Sage has failed, do you? - <AUTHOR> http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2014/08/you-dont-really-think-that-sage-has.html

<comment><USER2> What a shame. I've been involved with Sage for a number of years and I find it very useful. I didn't realize it was languishing in quite the state that Stein describes.

It would be a shame if it morphed into an expensive online subscription service from its present form as a downloadable desktop/laptop app that I have installed on all my machines and use nearly every day.</comment>


Play with these js physics - <AUTHOR> http://lonely-pixel.com/ I believe this site be made in jquery also can anyone tell me if it is using a static web generator like these? https://iwantmyname.com/blog/2011/02/list-static-website-generators.html <comment><USER2> Wow - that is really a good job. The tear-able cloth is amazing. I also loved the rain drops.

<comment><AUTHOR> its not my website, I thought I will share my finding with others</comment></comment>


Consider adding a "skip to main content" link to your website - <AUTHOR> https://webplatform.news/issues/2020-05-26 <comment><USER2> It looks like everyone is missing the point--he's talking about adding such a link for people using screen readers, not for the average person.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, screen reader users and keyboard users. People who rely on the focus order to navigate web pages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yeah... scroll to main content and then all the ads / javascript / images / videos load and the main content is pushed out of view.

The main content should always be visible upon page load.

</comment><comment><USER4> Consider adding content that renders without JS to your website.

<comment><AUTHOR> I use around 40 KB of JavaScript (transferred size). It's self hosted. I don't load JavaScript from other domains, and I have a very strict Content Security Policy.

My website's performance and security should therefore be pretty good. I don't think it's a problem that I use client-side rendering, but I'm willing to change my mind if I'm presented with a good argument.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure that you trust your security and speed to be good, but for a random Internet user, your website is just a random website on the Internet, without any special deviation from the mean.

Those who consider the average JS website slow/insecure/tracker-ridden will just skip it if they see no content. Ain't nobody got time to do audits just for one article, and the leap of trust to drop the shields needs to be earned too.

I don't necessarily consider this a good argument. It eventually depends on how important those people are to you as the audience.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a good point. My notification "This website requires JavaScript to render" is not sufficient. I should improve it to describe the website in more detail, provide contact information, include a screenshot, explain what JavaScript code is loaded if enabled, and other useful information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why isn't it above the fold in the first place?</comment>


iBurn unlikely to be available for Burning Man - <AUTHOR> http://www.gaiagps.com/news/article/iBurn%202011%20very%20unlikely%20to%20be%20available%20for%20Burning%20Man

<comment><USER2> Used iBurn last year, super useful. Sad. But relatedly, this site <http://burnermap.com> is pretty awesome; it lets you figure out what camp your friends are staying at on the playa. (They should have a lot of the camp geodata that iBurn needs, too, there's like 10K Burners who've FB connected.)

Separately, for finding/offering rides to Burning Man, a few of us have been working on <http://burningmanrides.com>, so if you've got feedback, let me know! email in profile.

</comment><comment><USER3> On a related note, anyone have any advice on how to tell your new employer that you're taking off for burning man? I ...uh...have a friend...

<comment><USER4> In English, probably.</comment></comment>


Ruby and .Net Developers solve two different kinds of problems - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nitriq.com/RubyAndNetDevelopersSolveTwoDifferentKindsOfProblems.aspx <comment><USER3> Interesting having a sales pitch in the last paragraph.

I think it's a good idea to promote your product with interesting/educational content... though there is nothing to differentiate the pitch from the content here (it's heading towards "advertorial"); and 37signals do this all the time without needing to mix the two.

But it also makes me question the whole post - did it exist purely for the purpose of carrying a sales pitch? And on reflection, I do find the content a bit lacking: "perhaps the language is too verbose" was interesting; and it seems very true that Ruby is used for small projects, and .Net are used for enterprise-size projects; but his conclusion, that "the resulting code is going to be verbose" doesn't connect to the question, which was about the _language_ being too verbose.

A way to connect them is that huge projects have more names, and so you need longer variable/method/class names to distinguish them (I'm including namespaces in name length here); and in huge projects, you need names that are more self-descriptive (because it is so important than someone else will be able to understand it, someone who might not ever get to meet you to ask you) - and self-descriptive names are long. You'd like to reuse this full information without the typing. Hence, intellisense.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I was a little unsure whether or not to include the last paragraph, but I did up with the idea for the post not thinking about how I could use it to pimp my stuff.

<comment><USER3> glad to hear it!

btw: keep the paragraph - pimp your stuff by all means - and (eg) a simple bar <hr> would separate it; that's how 37signals and Joel do it (of course, maybe it's just me who was distracted by it). While it is very effective advertising to integrate it into the story (a kind of product placement), it's harder to do both well than focus 100% on the content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> FTA: "But even after borrowing as much as we can from Ruby, it isn't going to make the gigantic complicated sales management system for a Fortune 500 company be not gigantic and complicated. Hopefully it will be a slightly smaller and more simple, but that application is never going to be so simple that you don't need an IDE or intellisense. "

This is just nonsense. I used to be a .NET developer before I jumped to Ruby. The Rails application I develop on now has well over 1000 class files, plus all the associated views, etc. It's at least as complex as this mythical, undefined "enterprise application" ( a meaningless distinction) the author speaks of, and our team of 4 manages just fine using text editors.

The only reason Intellisense is needed in .NET is because it's such a verbose language. If you want to open a file in .NET, you've got to create a FileStream object, and then a StreamReader object, and blah blah blah and before you know it you've got a dozen lines of code. In Ruby, you type "File.open(filename)". Done!

Ruby just gets out of your way, whereas .NET is often an obstacle in the way of what you want to accomplish.

<comment><USER5> What about System.IO.File.ReadAllText(path); ?

That said, even if the language required more than one line to read a file, that wouldn't be a good example of a language being verbose. That would be an example of a missing shortcut in the standard library, which is an important distinction (the latter is much easier to fix than the former.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My theory: As a dynamic language, Ruby doesn't scale, but _not_ in terms of performance--it doesn't scale in terms of developers. Projects written in dynamic languages have a development edge at smaller scales--more functionality can be produced faster by fewer developers.

If a project expands to a large number of number of developers, eventually the power to do virtually anything becomes a liability when a lone bad developer can wreak havoc on a project-wide scale by redefining standard functions, or relying on scary monkey patches.

<comment><USER4> In practice, this doesn't happen nearly as often as you might like to believe. Where I work, we monkey patch occasionally, but never the standard functions. It's usually a 3rd party library that we're editing that we need to bend to suit our use case.

<comment><USER6> Is your shop 20+ developers? Monkey patching isn't dangerous in and of itself, to my mind, but the prospect of code-surprises is ever present. When I read code, I may not realize it has been overwritten elsewhere. I'm not sure at what number of hires _that guy_ makes his way into the group, but debugging becomes an increasing part of development costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't think he did a very convincing job of explaining Intellisense. Frankly, one of the reasons I avoid Python and Ruby for my projects is that there's simply not a good IDE for either of them. The Eclipse plugins make me want to cry as I pound CTRL+space in vain trying to get autocompletion to work for a class I defined the same file I'm typing in.

In VS.NET, intellesense doesn't just reduce the amount of typing you do. I mean sure, it does and all. It reduces it to pretty much zero. You can put the cursor on an empty line and hit CTRL+space and it will suggest "for". It knows everything about the language, and everything about the class library it's dealing with, and everything about every class in your project, and everything about stuff you haven't even referenced. It knows context too, so it'll figure out what you actually want to see.

But that's not why you need it. It knows your codebase so you don't have to. It knows all the class libraries so you don't need to memorize any of them. It compiles your stuff as it goes so that you can navigate around it like everything was hyperlinked. And it doesn't find things by matching strings, so you can refactor to your heart's content without breaking anything.

All of that is stuff you want to do in Ruby. It's an awesome language and all that, but it still needs to open files and I don't want to keep file opening in my head, so I need a tool that lets me type "File." and pops up a little menu telling me properties of the File class.

So no, it's not that we're doing different things. We're doing the same thing. I just feel like I have a lot more space in my brain to keep domain stuff because it's not filled with the entire content of my codebase.

<comment><USER8> If IDE is your primary hang up -- go with IronPython, which has integration into VS.Net : <http://www.ironpython.net/tools/> (including intellisense).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if Twitter, Scribd, Hulu, Friends for Sale would agree.

I agree that .Net projects do tend to differ from Ruby projects. But I'm not willing to be as definitive as the author by saying "Ruby and .Net Developers Solve Two Different Kinds of Problems". That's too black and white for me.

Also, the fact that there are IDE's for Ruby (RubyMine and Netbeans) shows that there is becoming more of a desire / need for an IDE in the Ruby world. Even the good old standard of using TextMate mixed with a zillion plugins / macros shows a need.

Getting back to the point of the tweep's original question though; If a person doesn't understand the value of intellesense, they're not doing it right.

<comment><USER10> _If a person doesn't understand the value of intellesense, they're not doing it right_

I think the argument against a full-blown IDE which optimizes code-writing is, if it's possible for an IDE to make your code easier to read or write, why isn't it possible to simply improve the programming language itself to make the code easier to read or write? Some sort of automated code translation/compression/generation is improving the coding experience for you, the developer. So why can't that improvement be baked into your compiler/parser/libraries, so the program's code reflects that improvement regardless of the tool you use to view it?

<comment><USER11> Regardless of how simple a ruby API is, I can't keep them all in my head. That's why there are tools like ri and the various ruby doc sites. Having that integrated could be useful. When I do a lot of coding, I usually have a lot of browser and textmate windows open for reference.

<comment><USER9> This is what I'm referring to. An IDE should make what I already know easier to get from brain to fingers to keyboard to screen.

Intellesense does this by letting me type a couple chars of a known method, then pressing tab.

It should also make what I kinda know easier to find.

A good IDE does this by letting me find a method in intellesense and showing me the method description.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I work at a large "enterprise" company (35,000+) and .NET is the primary tech for in-house custom application development. Much of the development is built around SOA, so there are very few "standalone" apps that is considered "enterprise" in size/scope (i have limited industry exposure, but i highly doubt many org's build anything truly resembling "enterprise" software -- they buy it).

Being familiar with .NET and Ruby/Rails, you would be hard-pressed to find .NET development in my org that couldn't be done as well as or better in Ruby/Rails.

The reality is .NET is a "safe" choice for large businesses. The people making these technology decisions do not understand (or care about) the technical aspect of the technology, but rather look for the status quo/known quantity (few large firms want to use 'unproven' technology), support contracts (if something breaks we can at least get the vendor to fix it), available/sustainable (and ultimately off-shoreable) labor, and a "unified platform" (Exchange email leads to active directory leads to MS product A leads to MS product B, etc.).

It comes down to the high-level IT governance, and what IT steering committees are comfortable with staking their reputation/jobs on.

"No one ever got fired for buying IBM (or MS)"

The only reason why .NET and Ruby/Rails developers solve different kinds of problems is because management are large companies are too scared/lazy to try out new solutions, thus Ruby (and many other lang devs) aren't even allowed to solve ".NET problems".

Anyhow - the article was just a nice little PR move anyhow.

</comment><comment><USER10> _I think the larger misconception he has is that Ruby developers solve the same kinds of problems as .Net developers. They don't. Not even kinda.... In general, Ruby developers create small to medium size websites ... On the other hand, .Net developers create a lot of large scale enterprise applications._

OK, so what are some of the .NET enterprise applications that are too complex to be built in Ruby - or at least are better built in .NET?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not saying that you can't build large complex applications in Ruby. You can. You could also write them in Brainfuck. Having static typing helps tremendously when you have a team of 50 developers and 15 BAs. There are so many moving parts and edge cases that having an IDE and autocompletion is a must have. A team of 50 ruby devs are going to have a heck of a time keeping track of all of that business functionality without an IDE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _"It just seems to me that if intellisense really drastically reduces > typing, perhaps the language is too verbose"._

@viggity ... your friend is right ;)

But it's not the language (C# is decent) ... it's the company behind it, the community, the culture, which ultimately contribute to God-awful libraries.

Also, please don't hide behind the "scalable enterprise applications" argument.

Show me any CRM, and I can make with you a bet that the stuff 37signals does is way harder ... even if their products are simpler in functionality, a small company that sells products straight to consumers has drastic budget and time limitations, not to mention the burden of meeting consumer expectations (which with enterprise apps doesn't happen, because enterprise apps are awful by definition).

Also you want to talk about applications ... but I still haven't found a good CMS written for .NET (commercial or open-source), even though a CMS is nothing new and even though for PHP you can find a dime and a dozen.

Again, it's not the language, it's the culture ... go have a look at <http://playframework.org> , a gem among piles of shit that are forming the Java ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER14> I really dislike articles like this. They are fluffy and one sided. The author clearly has little experience with Ruby. I've never used Ruby in a mission critical project, and clearly neither has the author.

As primarily a .NET developer would love to see the day where I could comfortably ditch VS and use Vim instead. Instead I settle for VsVim. But is that really something MS is striving for? Of course not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps my article was a little fluffy, but I guess I wanted to take a second to stick up for .Net. It takes a lot of bashing (some of it deservingly), but a lot of the criticism too is one sided - .Net has to support a lot more types of applications than Ruby does and that is going to lead to verbosity - <USER2> the people bashing it don't take that into account.

<comment><USER14> I don't think .NET has to support different "types" of applications. I think just about anything you can build in .NET you could do in Ruby. Ruby has a bit of a reputation for being on the slow side, and sometimes that can be an issue, but other than that, it's a general purpose language with a vibrant community, so in the end rather capable.

I think the difference lies more in the cultures. .NET was born out of the largest software company in the world with billions at stake. That alone ensures it will be on the conservative side. Whereas Ruby was born more in the open source and start up community, it has more freedom to just go for it. Look at Rails 3, massive changes and a general attitude of "this new way of doing it is better, so buck up." Which is fine, perfectly fine, for Ruby. Microsoft would never get away with that (take ASP.NET 4 for example, they went to exhaustive lengths to make sure it can be ran in "legacy" mode). The jump from .NET 1.1 to 2.0 was a painful one, and so was 3.5 to 4, and Microsoft knows that. Yet they still maintain admirable backwards compatibility despite all of that. They took serious effort to make sure from 4 on, .NET releases can live side by side. I don't think your average Ruby framework/library/whatever would care so much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I work professionally with Ruby and .NET. The current project I'm working in is written in Ruby; the project before that was written in C# 3.5.

I use Intellisense a lot in C#, but oddly I don't miss it when I'm programming in Ruby. And when I'm programming in Clojure, I _do_ have "Intellisense" via SLIME, but I don't actually use it a lot.

I'm not entirely sure why this is the case, but I'd speculate that it's because the REPL takes the place of Intellisense.

In C#, I use Intellisense to remind me how a library works, and to explore the API. In a language like Ruby or Clojure, I have a REPL permanently open, and I use that for exploring the API, or reminding me how something works. It takes a couple more key presses to get to than the Ctrl-Space of Intellisense, but the REPL is more powerful. Also, modern REPLs usually support tab completion, so you can use it like Intellisense.

Come to think of it, I use the SLIME REPL so often I should probably add an explicit keybinding for it.

</comment><comment><USER16> As someone who does consulting on both Ruby and .Net regularly (and appreciate both), I'd love to believe I solve 2 totally different problems (heck, that could mean I'm twice as good :-).

But no, really: I believe that apart from desktop UI-heavy applications (and I do work on this), Ruby and .Net can be used for exactly the same topics.

It feels a bit like if the headline is intended at reassuring people: you're not doing Ruby ? That's not that bad, it's ok.

My personal belief is a developer that doesn't have a grasp at both static (java/c#) and dynamic (be python or ruby or...) is really losing something there.

</comment><comment><USER17> I must have missed something...how did we jump from questioning Visual Studio to the conclusion that Ruby and .Net developers are solving problems in different domain spaces? There are IDE's for Ruby, good ones. What does that matter though?

</comment><comment><USER16> My own personal summary:

\- it's ok if you're suffering everyday with over-engineered codebases

\- we provide a tool to ease the pain - go buy it!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Admittedly, this is part flamebait, but I think I make some pretty reasonable assertions.

<comment><USER18> It certainly made me reevaluate my thinking on the two languages and problem domains. The only small bit I'd disagree with is that Ruby is only used for websites, but I'll hardly create a fuss over that.

If people are looking to poke at you, they'll do it, but otherwise, I'd say, yeah, it's a reasonable observation/opinion.</comment></comment>


Science Fiction Stories with Good Astronomy and Physics: A Topical Index (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.astrosociety.org/education/astronomy-resource-guides/science-fiction-stories-with-good-astronomy-physics-a-topical-index/ <comment><USER2> "Haldeman, Joe The Forever War. 1974, Ballantine. An interstellar war is fought using black holes for travel between battles."

I've read Forever War half a dozen times. Black holes aren't a focus of the novel, but rather the effects of relativity on soldiers fighting far flung battles. By the time soldiers reach a battle, everyone they know on Earth is dead and several generations have passed due to time dilation.

</comment><comment><USER3> ... full of HUGE spoilers! Just some random searching on Alastair Reynolds' novels revealed many many things that are only revealed at the end of his books.

</comment><comment><USER4> I recommend Greg Egan's Orthogonal trilogy: _The Clockwork Rocket_ , _The Eternal Flame_ and _The Arrows of Time_. It features a finite four-dimensional universe with no time-like dimension.

<comment><USER5> A world whose physics is described by a pure Riemann tensor.

<comment><USER4> Yes. Very strange physics. And there are explanatory appendices, plus a website ;)

For what it's worth, it's similar to some of the universes that Egan featured in _Diaspora_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "More or less accurate science", with rather significant error towards "less" in many cases.

Now, don't get me wrong; I love SF, and will happily suspend disbelief for wildly implausible fictional technologies (as long as an author doesn't then go on to flagrantly violate the physics of their own universe out of sloppiness or as a plot device).

That said, for example, I'm not entirely sure what part of current science suggests that flinging a spaceship at a black hole ("collapsar") at relativistic velocities will cause said vessel to pop out of another black hole, near-instantaneously, elsewhere in the galaxy. ("The Forever War", as much as I love you, I'm looking squarely at you.)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd like to suggest Blindsight by Peter Watts. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_\(Watts_novel\))

<comment><USER8> I just read it. What part of it is accurate astronomy and physics, specifically?

<comment><USER9> It's rather physiology, not physics.

<comment><USER8> More like psychology and philosophy.

<comment><USER9> Also. But note several mechanisms alien creatures used on human explorers; those were totally physiological.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Asimov, Isaac The Gods Themselves. 1972, That's my favorite Sci-fi novel of all times; the aliens come in triads; one is the rational, the other the emotional the third one is the parent/Mother. They have sex by melting into each other, when they become one - because the weak nuclear force is so weak in this universe; Pure Genius.

</comment><comment><USER9> I would add: Jack Campbell, The Lost Fleet series. Excellent spaceship battles, actually accounting the speed of light, vast distances, space-time distortion to some degree, and plenty of logistics and manoeuvring.

</comment><comment><USER11> I happened across this book, which seems to be little heard of and really enjoyed it. Premise is great and the science seems solid for the most part. Author seems like he tried hard to stick with things that are not denied by the laws of physics as we know it.

[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21523077-attenuation--- le...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21523077-attenuation---letters-from- the-man-in-the-moon)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd also like to recommend the novel series "The Expanse". While not entirely accurate, at least the start of the series deals with a lot of the near-future limits in space travel: lack of gravity and the consequences thereof for humans, acceleration, radiation etc.

And in the new TV-Adaptation there are fascinating little details like sparrows flying/hovering in 0.3G inside a tunnel inside an Asteroid (Ceres) with an artificially induced spin.

</comment><comment><USER13> Quantum computing is not on the list. I wrote a novel, Qubit, in which quantum computing plays a central role.

[http://www.amazon.com/Qubit-Finn-Mack- ebook/dp/B00F45N40O](http://www.amazon.com/Qubit-Finn-Mack- ebook/dp/B00F45N40O)

Not on the list, and I'm not a physicist so from that standpoint, I may not have gotten everything right. Still, I'd like to think Qubit would pass muster.

<comment><USER14> That may be deliberate, since it's not really understood. Robert J. Sawyer's _Neanderthal Parallax_ series and _Factoring Humanity_ (which is listed for a couple of other reasons) also hinge on quantum computing to one degree or another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It would make sense to keep this list curated, as people who don't have a background in physics and/or astronomy might think a piece of fiction depicts it well, but misses some key aspect.

That said, how does the author accept suggestions or additions?

</comment><comment><USER16> I have yet to find an author who adheres to actual science and writes a readable story. Some flexibility is required to transform a potential story into a page turner. I'd like to be proven wrong though.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's dated 2014, which explains the omission of Seveneves.

</comment><comment><USER8> Lots of Niven in there. Happens to be my favorite writer.

<comment><USER18> And a bunch of the Nivens there have faster-than-light travel which should be an immediate disqualification.

<comment><USER8> That is how sci-fi works. You make a few assumptions and work from there, exploring their consequences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> From the myths of the Gods to the Sci-Fi of the modern age. Stories inspire and give life to technological advancement just as much as technological advancement gives rise to stories.</comment>


Ask HN: If I was to build bitcoingamblinggame.com would you play it? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Hell no.

● You do absolutely nothing to differentiate yourself from the crowd.

● What is a 'gambling game'?

● Why would I waste money on something as zero-effort as this question?

● Are you legally registered as a gaming operator?</comment>