Built in Boston: Why Great Entrepreneurs Are Choosing MA to Build Their Startups - <AUTHOR> http://bostinno.com/2012/02/14/built-in-boston-why-great-entrepreneurs-are-choosing-ma-to-build-their-startups/

<comment><USER2> People actually move to new cities in order to found startups?

And when they do, they move to _Silicon Valley_ or the _Bay Area_ , where talent is more expensive than anywhere else on the planet?

WTF?

I live in Boston and dig it, but this sort of article screams "trying too hard." Anyone who even considers the possibility that Boston might not have enough talent for their startup is a crackhead. Basically any place with a university and access to the internet is a good enough place for the right founder to build something of quality.

<comment><USER3> _Basically any place with a university and access to the internet is a good enough place for the right founder to build something of quality._

This is true, but making a successful startup requires a lot more than building a quality initial product. Although successful companies can be _founded_ virtually anywhere, the domain knowledge needed to grow and scale a technology startup is concentrated in certain geographies—especially Silicon Valley and San Francisco. In terms of tech entrepreneur social networks and institutional knowledge about investment, growth, scaling, etc., Boston is far behind the Bay Area, and the gap is growing every day.

<comment><USER2> > the domain knowledge needed to grow and scale a technology startup

This is a common enough claim that it could be considered "common knowledge," and I wouldn't be in a good position to refute it even if I could figure out _what exactly the claim is_.

Is the claim that it takes specific domain knowledge to convince people with money to invest in a business? That it takes specific domain knowledge to scale up a sw/hw infrastructure to handle top-tier web application workloads? That is takes specific domain knowledge to hire teams of engineers?

All of those things are true, of course, but in what way is any of that domain knowledge particularly concentrated in SV or the Bay Area?

The concentration of already-exited former-founders is higher, and that's real, but at the end of the day we're still talking about Software Businesses. Is the problem of converting value-laden software to revenue streams really all that exotic and complicated, such that only people in a particular social network have cracked it?

> the gap is growing every day

Again, a) by what metric, and b) even if true n-1 of the last n days, it's a big world out here and a lot of it writes code and attacks problems.

Cheers-

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I will add that Backupify started in Louisville, KY, and we were funded by First Round while we were still there. We didn't have to move to raise money, but we couldn't find the tech/startup talent we needed. So we looked at NYC, Boston, and the Valley. I talked to lots of people who lived in each place and ultimately, as you would expect, everyone raved about whichever place it was that they lived. Ultimately, I chose Boston because MIT is the most innovative place in the world, and because it is a highly intellectual city and I have a lot of interests outside of just tech startups. I've been very very happy here, and think it's a great place to build a company.

<comment><USER5> I've heard a lot of good things about Louisville and enjoyed when I visited. It's a wonderful small city. Old Louisville is quite charming.

I would imagine it would be hard to find a critical mass of tech talent there, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I run a startup and a consulting business in Miami.

My girlfriend has been offered to move to Boston, and I'm not going to hide that I'm afraid at the idea of leaving a place where I built tons of connection in the past 6 years (I moved to Florida from Italy, so I started with 0 connections). I'm afraid that I will have to start from scratch again in Boston, where I don't know a single person.

What are you thoughts about moving a company to Boston? Are people open to accept a new person in the community or is it very closed and elitist (I'm definitely not MIT or Harvard material).

EDIT: By the way, I will be in Boston (she's going to check the place) from March 10th to the 13th, I would love to meet you or participate to any event. So if you are there please email me at davide at 39inc.com :)

<comment><USER7> Lots of good geeks and networking possibilities here. One big difference between FL and MA (besides the weather) is that in MA we're generally up-front about it when we dislike people. I much prefer it. Saves wasting time on people who don't want anything to do with you, and make it much clearer who the people that DO want something to do with you are. Obviously, your mileage may vary with this.

Of course, living in Boston is crazy expensive too...

<comment><USER8> You can live just outside of Boston for pretty cheap. I'm currently in Framingham and moving to Somerville sometime this summer. Probably going to be around $2000/month (counting bills).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been working on a directory of Boston-area tech startups:

<http://startupsinboston.com/>

Currently about 242 listed -- I know there are more, but discovery is challenging; many web startups don't make any mention of where they're physically located on their site.

</comment><comment><USER10> Boston is a place where a lot of things start. Do music here, then on to LA. Standup comedy here, then to the real land of New York City. Tech startups are born here then go to the Bay area.

</comment><comment><USER11> A few reasons why Buzzient is in Boston and staying put:

[http://www.buzzient.com/blog/why-buzzient-moved-to-the- innov...](http://www.buzzient.com/blog/why-buzzient-moved-to-the-innovation- district)

One of the main ones just being Geography: We are close to tons of great schools for hiring talent and there is customer access as well, with so many other Fortune 1000 companies around, in Finance especially. If only the investors took as much risk as those in CA and in NYC!

</comment><comment><USER12> Related question: if you're not aiming to raise money or grow big fast, how important is it to be in a tech hub?

I live in Waltham, right outside of Boston, and am considering moving somewhere cheaper and warmer because the benefits of building a company here (or SV) don't seem as important if you're going the MicroISV/Micropreneur route. Thoughts?

<comment><USER13> Come to Austin. We have a nice tech scene here (and budding seed/angel funding community) and it's still relatively cheap to live here.

And it's pretty warm--though the summers get hot. But that's the beauty of growing an Internet business--locate somewhere it's cheap, and head out for a month or two whenever you need to.

<comment><USER12> Thanks. My wife and I are leaning towards Orlando due to its proximity to family. Can anyone comment on the Orlando startup scene?

<comment><USER14> It is cheaper and there is a lot of low priced, decent talent coming from UCF but if you are selling locally it will be tough since everything sells for less there.

You will also have no backup plan if your startup doesn't work since wages are so low.

There is no startup scene and everyone you meet will work in real estate or hospitality.

I live in beacon hill now and can tell you that I am constantly impressed by the smart people I meet in Boston. When I lived in Orlando I felt the exact opposite.

<comment><USER15> this. I love florida and usually spend a month or two in the winter there. I am not impressed with the people, coming back to boston is a breath of a fresh air. I can move my startup there full time but I don't primarily because of how out of place I feel most of the time (and its too darn hot in the summer)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there a particular type of startup that would be appropriate for Boston versus other locations? My instinct is that outside of Biotech and Enterprise software, it is still a huge disadvantage to start a startup in Boston, but I would love to be proven wrong (ideally by some sensible statistics).

Is Boston the kind of place where you can locally raise a seed round with ten or twenty angels for your consumer web startup with great traction but no revenue? Is Boston the kind of place where you can find engineers whose former job was to scale a database or web server or cache to hundreds of millions of active users? Are there deep pocketed companies locally who can afford to and regularly do acquisitions? Are MIT/Harvard (or BC, BU, NE, Tufts, WPI, Olin) grads going to Boston startups, or are they going to banking, Dropbox, or Facebook? Are there enough senior people around?

Vertica, ITA, and Basho are all great companies for example, but are they succeeding because they are in Boston, or in spite of it? How often are these companies flying out to the SF Bay Area to handle core parts of their business (customers, investment, business development)?

<comment><USER17> ITA and Kayak were both founded in the Boston area. I've never really figured out why travel sites seem to have such a base in the Boston area. Anybody have ideas? Proximity to Logan for international travel? MIT and Harvard being located there hence lots of travel...?

<comment><USER18> Founders of ITA were MIT grads, and hired lots of MIT folks. (Former ITA Software employee here - though not an MIT grad). ITA has been around for over a decade FWIW.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really like the Boston tech scene, and the atmosphere and social environment created around it. I work with a lot of folks from/around the area on a daily basis, so even though I'm not in Boston, I have a lot of friends and connections there and make at least one pilgrimage there a year to spend a few days doing business in person. If it weren't for separating the child from the grandparents, I would move into the area (though maybe not _in_ Boston itself, due to the high cost of living). Maybe when the kid is older.

</comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone care about living in a city that's just plain nice to live in? Everyone's so concerned about whether a city is conducive to start-ups they miss out on evaluating quality of life from a personal perspective.

I choose to live in San Diego because I love to live in San Diego, for innumerable personal reasons, not because it's "startupy". Stocktwits moved to Coronado island near San Diego not because there's a thriving start-up scene here, but because it's just a damn nice place to live and work. Developers who can live anywhere should want to live in great places for personal reasons.

For whatever it's worth, I've done a significant amount of traveling around the United States (mostly on three JetBlue flying passes) and in general find cities like Boston to be overrated in terms of quality of life, especially when factoring in the enormous cost of living.

No doubt these are all personal value judgments. I just wonder why people optimize so little on the simple personal quality of life vector and so much on whether there's a bunch of "startupy people" there.

<comment><USER13> I'll respond. I lived in the Bay Area for 10 years, had a very successful exit, and packed it up to move to San Diego. Started another startup there and met my co-founder there--but recently went to Austin.

I missed the energy of the Bay Area, frankly. San Diego is sleepy. But the last thing I wanted to do was go back to the Bay Area and get sucked into the vortex again. Austin seemed like a happy medium.

Since moving to Austin, I can safely say that I expect my company's revenues to more than double this year from what we were doing in San Diego. We work with many local businesses, and we're booming right now. In fact, since we moved from San Diego, we've grown from 7 to 9 people, hired another full-time developer, etc.

Things are just way more exciting here. (Not to mention that I'll save nearly $40,000 this year on taxes. And groceries/housing/gas are way cheaper.) Though I'll always have a place in my heart for San Diego, it's just not a great place to do a startup. Austin is my home for the foreseeable future, and I'm happier here than I ever was there, despite the amazing weather in SD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why you might not want to move to MA/Boston if you're an employee: [http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2011/09/no...](http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2011/09/noncomps.html)

Their non-compete laws are some of the most repressive in the nation.

<comment><USER22> Since moving to the Boston area in the mid 90s, I have never seen an employment agreement or contract with a non-compete clause lasting after employment ends.

YMMV, but you should also be reading and negotiating these things.

<comment><USER23> I have. A friend got a job a local weekly; her contract forbid her from working for other local papers and media companies for up to a year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Probably for the low taxes, I'd guess.

<comment><USER22> Massachusetts is dead average (#24) on the Tax Foundation's climate index (<http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/22658.html>).

However, taxes are probably going to be a pretty small consideration for a startup, since the top three locations (Wyoming, South Dakota, Nevada) are not particularly hot in startup land, but the bottom three (California, NY, New Jersey) are.</comment></comment>


London Startup Weekend June 4 - 6 - <AUTHOR> http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/952/ideas/232386/

<comment><USER2> Speaking of which:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1340873>

I'm curious to hear what people think of these things.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am interested in this, but is it worth going if not a developer/designer but a (soon to be) machine learning masters graduate? ie does one get anything really out of it if you can't contribute much in the way of actual code,design etc? Anyone with similar background attended and found it good?

</comment><comment><USER4> Attending :)

Designer/Developer

</comment><comment><USER5> In Developer(Backend)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm in (developer)</comment>


GameStop hands out $50 gift cards after pulling free OnLive game coupons - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/26/gamestop-50-gift-card/

<comment><USER2> But are they also giving back the OnLive coupons?</comment>


Paul Buchheit: The Cloud OS - <AUTHOR> http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/12/cloud-os.html <comment><USER2> I still think he's missing the point here. Android's ability to run native apps IS its weakness. ChromeOS, believe it or not, employs the Apple method of success. Apple imposes all kinds of restrictions on its developers but the end result is applications that are remarkably uniform. By making ChromeOS web only Google is imposing "use the cloud" on its developers and in doing so creating an environment that fulfills the promise of portability (Android and iOS come close but aren't anywhere near seamless)

As for the two points that will lead to Chrome's demise…

ChromeOS will lose because it will lack native apps – That seems short sighted to me. If Android is brought to the point where it supports web apps built for ChromeOS there will be very little reason to develop native Android apps. Assuming ChromeOS is not dead on arrival it makes all the sense in the world to target 2 platforms instead of one (especially when the development tools are the same ones everyone uses on the web). Especially given those apps also have a good chance of running on Palm's OS, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7 with very little modification (and even the iPhone in a crippled way)

Touch vs Mouse - I wrote a post after working on a touch application so I'll just direct you there: [http://tomstechblog.com/post/A-Quick-Indictment-Of- The-Finge...](http://tomstechblog.com/post/A-Quick-Indictment-Of-The- Finger.aspx). The gist was that touch really doesn't replace the mouse in practical situations (and I wrote that before owning an iPad so you can add "your screen gets dirty much quicker" to the list of reasons).

<comment><USER3> "Native" really isn't that significant. When Android first came out, it's "native" applications were all apps that were written more or less from scratch using the Android APIs. When Android first came out, there were essentially zero apps. "Native" usually isn't raw ARM binaries either, it's in the form of dalvik vm bytecode, optimized not for speed, but for executable size. The only time native is useful is with truly performance critical applications, and the vast majority of apps aren't performance critical. Javascript runtimes are getting faster with each release and the huge amount of competition between browser vendors. Chrome also has Native Client, which would be the equivalent of Android's NDK.

If by "native" you mean the user interface consistency, acknowledging that web apps will be significant pretty much destroys that anyway. Lots of iOS/Android apps don't even use the native UI widgets anyway, so it's not a really worthy goal.

Android started with a huge disadvantage: not having any apps. Yet only a few years later, the platform hundreds of thousands. Chrome and the web as a platform is much more approachable, and for every existing android or iOS app, in a short time, there will be rough equivalents that can be made.

From the start, Chrome has millions. All of them can be accessed with a consistent interface, where there's a single notion of an application. If android takes over, then you'll be constantly switching contexts from the browser and the "native" applications.

<comment><USER4> Have you spent much time with an Android phone? Android's strength is how seamlessly you can switch contexts. It's easy, it's fun, and it's efficient.

There's definitely a place for ChromeOS, but I'd rather use Android, because the browser just plain sucks at some things.

<comment><USER5> This rather assumes that the browser could not be improved upon.

I kind of feel like Tom... Chrome OS is actually what Android will turn into, not the other way around. The downloadable app paradigm is working fine for Apple, but it's been pretty miserable for Google. Their marketplace is pretty atrocious, and the method of selling them has been a constant headache.

I think Chrome OS is a stopgap to an OS where the browser doesn't appear as a bunch of tabs, but as something that probably looks more like iOS anyway. I think it shows Google thinking a little too small and releasing too early. Had it baked a couple of years, and it became branded as Android 4 or something ("Android... everywhere"), I think that would have been better. I wonder if they're not launching early in order to push things like Web Print, so by the time they are ready to do something groundbreaking, the technology is already in place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The one thing I haven't seen much discussion on with regards to cloud based operating systems is the handling of local peripheral devices. Printers, scanners, video cameras, etc. These devices are used by a wide range of users, from someone who emails pictures to their family, to an amateur who wants to shoot their next film project.

Right now, these devices are not very cloud friendly. In general you plug your printer, scanner, etc. into a USB or Firewire port. From there the operating system needs to work with the printer through some kind of driver. With the sandboxing that I've seen with Chrome OS, it appears to be a rather daunting task to support a wide array of such devices.

Another issue is the bandwidth cost. Let's say I somehow make a video camera "web enabled". Instead of interfacing with the PC through USB, it connects through wifi or wired ethernet. From there you could upload your video to a cloud app that does video editing, or upload it straight to youtube. However, what happens though when it's an hour long video of a family wedding? Depending on the camera's storage format, this could turn out to be a giant gigabyte file, and will take a ridiculously long time to upload given standard broadband connections.

Until this issue has a good solution, I see it extremely difficult to achieve this "live in the cloud" philosophy. This is not to say it's impossible, just that it needs to be well thought out.

<comment><USER2> I think the answer to both your questions is that the only way Google will succeed with ChromeOS is if they consider it a long-term play. The goal should be to have the most refined cloud based system 5-10 years from now. When looking at your questions from that perspective I'd give you two answers…

On Peripherals – Google is already addressing that problem with Cloud Print right now. The same concepts could easily be translated to other peripherals. Anyone whose tried to use it will tell you the concept is very rough right now but it has promise and several companies have agreed (in theory) to support it in their hardware with future versions.

On Large Files – I don't know of anyone who doesn't think our current bandwidth is just a fraction of what will be available to us 10 years from now. For video editors who need to use raw files I don't think Chrome is appropriate but Google's said as much by targeting the OS at the netbook/low- end notebook market to start. Again the point is to refine the OS through iteration (as Google does with all their products) so when editing video in the cloud is a possibility they'll already have the most refined OS for it.

<comment><USER5> re: Large Files... there's no reason the files have to be transmitted to the server anyway, the app could access local storage just fine. This probably indicates that the "save" paradigm is broken, and instead we'll need to start thinking about how to present "local save" to "cloud save" to users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> ChromeOS needs to expose the hardware capabilities of its host machine. That is really the only reason for native apps these days -- access to camera, accelerometers, various coprocessors, etc. Perhaps that will become viable if NaCl takes off, I don't know.

But speaking as a developer, the ChromeOS development model is much saner than those of its mobile counterparts. iPhone/Android development is antiquated and miserable in comparison. We are stifling ourselves by perpetuating a development model that worked in the 1990's.

Wherefore art thou, WebOS? You need a champion.

<comment><USER8> _That is really the only reason for native apps these days -- access to camera, accelerometers, various coprocessors, etc_

Or the CPU running at its full potential rather than interpreting Javascript, or storage that doesn't have 100+ millisecond network latency, or UI frameworks that were designed for applications rather than text documents...

The web is great for lots of things. The insistence that it should be the One True Way for applications strikes me as a case of man-with-a-hammer syndrome.

<comment><USER7> But poll any dev and ask which is more pleasant to write UI-heavy apps in: web tools, or Java? The forced decoupling of the presentation (HTML) from the styling (CSS) and application logic (JavaScript) is really a nice way of doing things.

I don't think this is man-with-a-hammer syndrome, merely that the approach to building web apps translates well for 90% of native apps. For everything else, there's a FFI or NDK.

The _major_ failing of ChromeOS, in my opinion, is that it needs an internet connection to work. (WebOS, for example, does not). The closest analog to "local" apps are browser extensions, and that is still a reasonable approach; the capabilities of such just need to be expanded a little. HTML5-style offline functionality is another option.

FWIW, most of my work is done in C these days. Different tools for different tasks.

<comment><USER8> _But poll any dev and ask which is more pleasant to write UI-heavy apps in: web tools, or Java?_

Why limit to "Java"? For apps that aren't just front ends to web services, I'll take Cocoa, Android, or wxPython over HTML5.

<comment><USER7> > Why limit to "Java"?

Oh, please. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy>

And my point still stands. The majority of apps are either front ends to web services, or can be constructed using a similar approach that we use for the web today. They are UI-heavy. I did say you should be able to drop to native code if you really need the power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _For example, interacting with my FriendFeed page involves the coordination > of thousands of individual processors and disks owned by a dozen different > entities, including you, Facebook, Amazon, Google, your ISP, and many > intermediate ISPs._

Put that way, the entire idea of "the cloud" sounds scary. I have a sudden urge to replace all the webapps I use with native apps.

<comment><USER10> Did you miss RMS' point of view about the cloud by any chance?

</comment></comment><comment> loup-vaillant (duplicate from the post's comment thread)

Good post, but there are two important things you overlooked here.

First, dumb terminals are about control. Not speed. Not behind the scenes smart shenanigans. Control at the user level. By that definition, web browsers and IPhones are Dumb. Jailbroken IPhones, Android phones (not locked), and PCs, are Smart. That's what cloud OS detractors talk about when they say "dumb terminal".

Second, viewing the internet as a secure vault that you can summon at will can be dangerous. Like, get-your-identity-stolen dangerous. ( _You_ know this, but many people don't.) There's also systemic risks associated with the centralization encouraged by the (re-)rise of dumb terminals. And you wouldn't want anyone to look at your private data (say your e-mail). Or doing automatic semantic analysis on it so it can directly extract the good stuff… and use it to his advantage.

Now, I agree the couple "cloud + dumb terminals" is extremely convenient, and has an unmatched potential for ease of use. Now if only it didn't require the user to relinquish his right for privacy (an even other freedoms in some cases), that would be great. Personally, I'm looking forward to see Eben Moglen's FreedomBox.

</comment><comment><USER11> So true: _This global super-computer enables us to do things that would have been impossible not long ago, such as instantly search billions of documents, .... leak embarrassing diplomatic cables, etc._

</comment><comment><USER8> I agree completely. Having all your stuff accessible wherever you are is a worthy goal. Ripping out the ability to use local storage and run native apps when appropriate isn't.

<comment><USER2> You can still use local storage in a cached form in ChromeOS. Given that let me ask you this: If technologies like WebGL give Web apps the ability to work and act like native ones would you support ChromeOS then?

<comment><USER8> Once "web" apps are using local storage and running offline and using the full power of the hardware, it's not clear what distinguishes them from "native" apps. Other than having to be written in the often-less-than-ideal HTML+JS+CSS, and even that isn't necessarily the case with NaCl.

<comment><USER12> I can think of at least one thing. When you are developing a web app, you don't have to worry about people using out-of-date versions of your app. On the flip side, when you use a web app, upgrades tend to be mandatory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have to agree with the author. There's nothing super unique and powerful about Chrome OS that can't be replicated and done better on top of Android. Further, iOS and Android have incredible momentum right now, and it's hard seeing Chrome OS picking up much traction, especially once Android 3.0 tablets start coming out.

</comment><comment><USER14> Typo? s/now/not/

"(BTW, Apple is lame for _now_ allowing a native Gmail app on the iPhone -- email is the one place where Android really outshines the iPhone for me)"

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops. Fixed. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does Chrome OS have a solution to The Airplane Problem?

(Can't really use it as a mobile computer if you can't use it on an airplane.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think WiFi on airplanes is the solution to The Airplane Problem :)</comment></comment>


57 YC startups' Twitter follower growth over time - <AUTHOR> http://socialgrapple.com/showcase/yc <comment><USER2> I don't understand those charts at all. Some charts show growth (right side of line is higher than left side of line) but the growth figure is negative. Some charts show decline, but the growth figure is highly positive. I have no idea what those charts are supposed to be illustrating - seems to be random noise.

<comment><USER3> And Dropbox is pretty much flat. I'm assuming that means data wasn't tracked between 0 and the 200,000 members they now have.

<comment><AUTHOR> The data is only being displayed for the past 30 days. Keep in mind, just because it's flat doesn't mean it's 0. It could be constant at a higher number of growth. My apologies for not showing that effectively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for posting this. I've been trying to get an idea of just how useful/helpful YC is in creating a successful company but evidence in of this impact in terms of social media has been hard to come by. any other sources you'd suggest?

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess it depends on how you define a successful company. In the capitalist sense, something like <http://yclist.com/> is probably most poignant.

I wouldn't say that YC has a huge impact in terms of social media; they definitely help with getting press mentions, but getting engaged subscribers is really up to the founders.

Twitter is not relevant to all companies, but it's obvious that many are leveraging it very effectively. I wonder if investors would be interested in a dashboard like this for all their portfolio companies. The correlation to "real growth" is probably small, but still better than nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any corrections/requests welcome. If I'm missing anyone, I'll be adding new accounts tomorrow, just toss them in this thread.

<comment><USER5> Pet peeve on sparklines: they're clean because they get rid of chartjunk, but they're also pretty uninformative without context. Right now, they add almost nothing to the presentation ("@dropbox hasn't changed <much> since <some time ago>, but this other guy's popularity is <swinging wildly/pretty small and noisy>").

Tufte originally intended them to be inserted into text and contextualized by it. As an extension, he suggested adding small indicators of scale and position as colored dots for example.

Either that or just lose them and graph the relative results of each of the contenders. It all depends on what kind of story you want to tell.

Edit: just noticed that you mention that this information is tracked over the last 30 days, but since that's not localized to the graphs, it's pretty easy to not notice it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point. I couldn't come up with a better way to display 57 charts on one page which give some kind of interesting information without it being a total mess.

The information is actually tracked indefinitely from when I started monitoring it, and I have daily changes for more than 30 days for each of these accounts at this point. I also have an interface for browsing each one of them in a more granular fashion so that the chartjunk is visible (I can give you access to this if you're interested). Here's Posterous for example: <http://goo.gl/QSGp4>

Do you have any ideas for how to better present such a comparison between so many data sources? Keeping in mind that scale varies hugely between the smallest and largest.

Edit: To me, the most interesting thing to look at in this showcase is the "shape" of the sparkline (which indicates stability) combined with the percent delta change next to it (click on it to get absolute numbers).

<comment><USER5> Oh man, this is fun!

I'd merge the chart and the current followers count. Even after you click the delta to find its absolute count, it's difficult to interpret it (to me). Place a green dot at the end of the chart and a red at the start and then color code two numbers to correspond. It'll give a sense of scale and variation that's currently missing. It'll also immediately suggest a linear model for followers over the last X days which might be a good summary for some names.

I'm not sure what to draw from the scale-independent representation you've got right now since I can't tell if wide swings in the sparkline indicate something really changed in way people follow that name or if it's just noise. This is a perfect opportunity for some sort of random process model which could be used to suggest that certain spikes (such as the recent one for @reddit) are maybe more interesting that real random variation.

I'd also look for ways to investigate and highlight weird behaviors like @greplin's bimodalism. That a pretty huge.

I'm not sure I understand how the expanded interface matches to the sparklines, actually. Posterous' doesn't match up with the sparkline much at all that I can see. Are you doing linear detrending?

I suppose as always there's no magic bullet for information presentation. There are any number of questions I think you could ask of a data set like this (stability, relative growth, comparison with other metrics like investment or publicity, looking for spikes).

I imagine that comparing each different company against the others would probably be not terribly useful since they're all at different scales, but I'd be very interested in things like how well data from one source could be predicted from all the others (which just starts out as computing correlation between them all) which might help you to separate out whole market trends from successes from each particular company.

The Tuftean method, which I support, still desires a complete, untransformed view of the raw data. So don't remove the sparklines. Just make them more interpretable by giving scale to the shape using further real data. Any of these cross-company models can potentially be added as additional information to the sparklines. Charts remain interesting and interpretable so long as they're drawn mostly in data-ink and are hierarchically readable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The one for Dropbox is wrong, if only that it misses the larger history and trends.

We doubled followers in a weekend by testing but not launching <http://dropbox.com/free>

Then we did Dropquest, and got another bump.

If we add twitter following to the getting-started quest <http://dropbox.com/gs> we could blow those changes out of the water.

A graph with context: <https://www.dropbox.com/s/mwmyb8zmt4kufis/at_dropbox.png>

<comment><AUTHOR> Emphasis on "past 30 days". Your graph with context shows most activity before January, whereas mine only begins in February.

I wish I had the foresight to start monitoring earlier.

<comment><USER6> You might be able to find other data sources, scraping <http://twittercounter.com/> for example

Also, API endpoints for friendship might have a follower_since date, and you can approximate the history. In so far as unfollowing is rare compared to following, it would be accurate.

<http://dev.twitter.com/doc/get/friendships/show> maybe?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfollowing is not as rare as you think. Out of all follows/unfollows SocialGrapple has tracked so far (for detailed accounts), 35% are unfollows of the subject account (63% unfollows from the subject account).

I did check the API, Twitter doesn't give you historical relationship data like that. This is something that SocialGrapple was built to solve.

Scraping is something I haven't considered, though being a tertiary source of data is something I'd like to avoid (I already have nightmares of Twitter shutting me down for no reason). I'm not even sure how accurate TwitterCounter's data is, at least I can account for my own and Twitter's mistakes. I'll give it some more thought nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Heyzap is number 8, woohoo.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm thinking I need to add big fat position numbers to each row and start tracking change in that. :P

<comment><USER7> Being able to count from the top is part of the challenge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting data, but unfortunately nothing you can see a trend in (other than the most well known companies have the most followers). One good advice you can take from this data: If you want to have many followers, you have to tweet more than once a day.

</comment><comment><USER9> So what's the value for these charts? Does it co-relate to the fact that the more followers the more successful the YC company is?

I really don't get the point of this post, and I'm commenting because I care about knowing the point of this post.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no specific point or statement, it's just "interesting data" that you can draw your own conclusions from.

For one, it's a nice overview of which YC companies are active on Twitter and which are not so much. Which are recently growing a lot, and which are stagnating.

It's also interesting to compare the number of followers to the number of following/tweets. We can see that Dropbox has very disproportional numbers, turns out this is because following @Dropbox on Twitter gives you a reward on their service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting how asymmetric the ratios are for almost all YC companies: they're happy to have people follow them, but not in general interested in following back.

</comment><comment><USER11> Awesome Andrey keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER12> Can you also add @tellfi (YC W11)</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use to manage your SaaS payment system? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I've been using Recurly for years. Very happy except about their current pricing. My next project will likely use Stripe Billing (which is improving).</comment>


Alex Honnold: How I climbed a 3,000-foot vertical cliff – without ropes - <AUTHOR> https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_honnold_how_i_climbed_a_3_000_foot_vertical_cliff_without_ropes <comment><USER2> People are always interested in how Honnold's brain might be wired differently, but this talk, about achieving a sense of mastery and satisfaction through meticulous preparation, is extremely relatable.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use for online backup? - <AUTHOR>

I was just reading this post about how this guy got robbed and almost lost all his data (http://levels.io/100-to-0-things/) so I'm wondering what everyone uses for online backup. <comment><USER2> BackBlaze here. Unlimited storage and can include external drives. Big fan and have been using it for years.

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazon Glacier with the Arq desktop client.

</comment><comment><USER4> A couple of physical servers running burp.

</comment><comment><USER5> rdiff-backup + rsync.net for a simple mirror; duplicity + rsync.net for backups

</comment><comment><USER6> SpiderOak

<comment><USER7> Came here to say that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tarsnap

</comment><comment><USER9> Carbonite

</comment><comment><USER10> Arq</comment>


A mix of hidden standards make the ubiquitous USB-C cable a pain to deal with - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/usb-c-was-supposed-to-simplify-our-lives-instead-its-a-total-mess-626bb2ea3688 <comment><USER2> I believe it was a failure by USB-IF to not require that USB-C ports and cables be labeled or color-coded as to what standard(s) they support. As a consumer you are lucky if the manufacturer provides accurate speed or wattage specifications to allow you to decode this information on your own.</comment>


Ask HN: Collective performance increase after an individual breakthrough - <AUTHOR> Why do we typically see a collective performance increase after a single individual makes a breakthrough? For example, after Roger Bannister ran the first 4 minute mile, the flood gates opened and many people could achieve this feat. <comment><USER2> Well, it's because of a challenge. It's in the human nature to live for challenges and so happens for example for many sports and science achievements.

You also can remember that that's the whole point of Guinness World Record circus</comment>


The New Neuroscience of Stuttering - <AUTHOR> https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/mind/2020/new-neuroscience-stuttering <comment><USER2> So stuttering is an effect of (over) activity in the brain, more precisely the default-mode-network, which is among other things responsible for (self) awareness. That sure explains a lot, I used to stutter a lot and be preoccupied with it, now I hardly stutter and don't think about it at all.

Also funny they mention, en passant, in-breading in Pakistan. Wanna study rare genetic effect? Just go to the place with excess gene-expression.

</comment><comment><USER3> I stutter, but not consistently. A friend of mine pointed once out that I only seem to stutter when I explain something, e.g, work or programming related. When I chit chat, when my mind wonders freely, I don't really seem to stutter much or at all.

<comment><USER4> I have a sort of similar problem with stuttering. I tell people I stutter, and no one really believes me because it I don't stutter in most common situations. But I get stuck on certain combinations of sounds when my brain is sort of working faster than I can talk. I often have to stop trying to say the word and pick a different one. It's quite maddening especially when being precise is important.

<comment><USER5> I have this too. This post also makes me realize that my thoughts and writing don't stutter, but sometimes my spoken words do. I have to actively slow down and think out the words I will say to make sure I can say them, rather than only think or read them. This ends up manifesting as slowness to respond but it's actually because I'm having to check my work before I start speaking and even then I can still fuck it up.

It would be great to listen /speak as fluidly as I think, without being an active process, but a passive process like everyone else.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Embed MP3 stream player? - <AUTHOR>

I make a chat website, and I'd like to add music streaming to the user chatrooms.
ie - the chatroom host can enter in a URL of a streaming MP3 and then everyone in the chatroom hears that stream - the music files are not stored on our servers, but just browser client to another URL
Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> Soundmanager2 [1] is widely used, and I've used it myself in a couple of projects.

It may be a bit to full-featured for the small thing you are trying to accomplish but you can customize it quite a bit.

You can just listen for mp3 links in the chatroom and queue it up in soundmanager.

[1] <http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/>

<comment><USER3> Doesn't flash have a same origin policy that would prevent you from streaming mp3s from random URLS. I thought you have to host both the player and mp3 at the same domain? Or at least have a policy file on both domains that says you can access it. I could be mistaken, but this is how I remember it from the last time I checked.

<comment><USER4> Flash can load MP3s from remote domains, but it cannot read certain metadata (eg. ID3 tags, waveform/eq/spectrum data) unless granted permissions via a crossdomain.xml policy file. For hosting, the SWF should be on the same domain as the HTML document or JS-Flash communication will be restricted (or, use the cross-domain version of the SWF.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Schill, can it load MP3 streams as well as MP3 files? Assume so, but just to check. Any suggestion on player?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


We need a longer school year - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/31/opinion/davis-longer-school-year/index.html <comment><USER2>
        students are most likely to outperform peers,
        both in traditional district schools and at
        other charters, if they attend schools that are
        open at least 10 days more than the conventional year.

I have a hard time believing it was those 10 days that made a difference.

Anyways, I was fortunate enough growing up to be part of the middle-income demographic, so didn't share the struggles of the article. The already-long, unchallenging, insulting school days/semesters were a struggle as it was. Extending that awful experience would've been gravely detrimental.

<comment><USER3> This article makes the common mistake of confusing correlation with causation. Some data points might correlate but that doesn't imply they cause each other.

<comment><USER4> Exactly right. Did they actually compare students from same school districts but different income families?

I would think that what is most likely is that good income family students (who can afford summer schools) probably go to better school, which is by itself self-reinforcing.

<comment><USER5> I don't think you'll get that kind of in-depth analysis and research from a "a nonprofit that promotes expanding learning time to improve student achievement".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Time once again for Kubrick:

"I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker."

This is like wondering if painting the walls green will help. There's so much else wrong that needs fixing first that this is a silly triviality. Like treating the sniffles when the patient has terminal cancer.

<comment><USER7> Except that interest doesn't work on a large scale. Schools exist to educate all their students to roughly the same level. Teaching by inspiring interest is a great idea, but one teacher does not have the means to teach the unique interests of 30 kids. To make that plan a success, you'd have to abolish the entire school system.

<comment><USER6> _Schools exist to educate all their students to roughly the same level._ How does that seem to be working out for them? Simply doing more of what we wish would work, but doesn't won't help.

I don't know how, but I think that interest is the _only_ thing that can work on a large scale. If society churns out kids that are only interested in guns, drugs, and proving they're "thugs 4 life", you might have a problem bigger than a school system can ever hope to solve.

Abolish the school system? You might be on to something.

Edit: Yeah, I get it. It's one of those, strong, unpopular opinions I hold loosely. I don't believe all school systems are unworkable, or even that this one has never been so. But I sure do think it is now. We're paying hugely for it and it's not working for us. Turn it off.

<comment><USER8> Here's an idea. Make school a low burden, free, for basic math and writing skills, etc. Basically what we have but lower-key. Then let everyone who really cares homeschool or pay for private school. Even if you don't abolish the requirement to go to school, lax requirements for homeschooling would have a similar effect.

Homeschooling is not for everyone, but personally, being homeschooled in high school was one of the best things that ever happened to me, in terms of learning, social interaction and even career opportunities.

<comment><USER9> How did homeschooling help you in terms of social interaction? I thought that was one of the arguments against homeschooling.

<comment><USER8> In short, while homeschooled, most of my socialization was with nice peoeple. Most of my social issues are from the jerks in public school.

We knew a few other families who homeschooled and met weekly; "The Moms" and occasionally Dads talked about parent stuff and the kids, around 20 of us in our heyday, just played whatever. We eventually took martial arts and rock climbing classes together. For the most part they were all pretty nice. They're still the best friends I've ever had.

Besides that, a lot of homeschoolers (like us) are religious, so we have religious gatherings we go to. I know a lot of my homeschool friends' friends from church, too.

My homeschool friends eventually led me to my last couple years of internships, including this summer at Google. It didn't hurt that homeschooling had given me lots of time to concentrate on programming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _We should expect our schools to furnish today's students with the education > they will need to excel in our global society._

Problem is, schools don't do that in the first place, for the most part. So a longer school year may make things worse. For examples, schools don't teach negotiation, setting up a basic business, what to do if police ask to search your car or home, credit card management, and many other things arguably more important than today's school subjects. I need my kids to have less time in school so that I can teach them those more important things. I don't want them to be educated only to the level that they can toil away in a cube farm for MegaCorp. I also want my kids to have plenty of time to _not_ be concerned with excelling in a global society; e.g. exploring national parks.

</comment><comment><USER11> ...is everybody really that obsessed about working more, learning more, doing more and wants to drive this onto our children too?! wtf?! why can't we use technology in ways that allow us to work LESS, to do LESS, to have more of "free time" for both us and our children?

paraphrasing a late wise man: the little buggers should have MORE time to just play with a stick in the mud! (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6wOt2iXdc4>)

what about "FREE TIME"? children especially should have MORE of it, not less. and maybe this way, we, the adults would finally understand the cruelty of having less then 2 months vacation a year! I know, it's America, where everything is overdone, but for fuck's sake, don't do this to your children too (...'cause afterwards everyone else will take your example)!

<comment><USER10> > ... maybe this way, we, the adults would finally understand the cruelty of > having less then 2 months vacation a year!

But then how are we going to compete with the Chinese?! How will the children survive when they're competing with 15 billion other people in the world (and more people is always better)? Or let's skip to the real point: how will they make rich people as richer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Editor's note: Jennifer Davis is the co-founder and president of the National Center on Time and Learning, a nonprofit that <_promotes expanding learning time _> to improve student achievement._

\-- There so many articles written by people that are the CEO of XYZ company w/ vested financial interest.

<comment><USER13> Since she's the co-founder, I assume this is at least a little different than someone pushing an ideology for profit. Presumably she really believes that a longer school year would benefit children, and both writing the article and co-founding the non-profit are meant to further that goal.

Instead, say, someone being hired to be the CEO of the non-profit, and then suddenly discovering a passion for doing whatever it is that helps pay the bills.

<comment><USER12> [http://aqpq.org/2011/06/13/the-met-and-moma-nonprofit- luxuri...](http://aqpq.org/2011/06/13/the-met-and-moma-nonprofit-luxuries/)

TL;DR MOMA paid its CEO $1.95Million 2008; non-profit != no financial interest.

Edited: for clarity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The problem not time in school, the discussion should be about motivating students. As long as the student is motivated to learn on their own, then more time in school might result in less learning, in the same way that continual 80 hour work weeks result in a drop in productivity.

My wife taught school in a lower income area. For students that could care less about learning, the parents treat school like free day care, and the students forgot a lot of their newly acquired knowledge over the 2 week winter break.

<comment><USER15> If they are losing the knowledge over a 2 week break, are they really keeping that knowledge with them over the course of a school year?

<comment><USER16> No.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm looking for a reference for the point, and my keyword searches on Google have yet to take me to the right place, but I recall that research has shown that gifted students actually have learning GAINS when they are out of school during summer, but then the school year begins with review of the material that other students didn't learn even during school the year before. So one strategy to make the time that children spend in school more worthwhile would be to let learners advance at their own pace, and not put all learners into lock-step grades in school by age.

<http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html>

We don't group students by height, or by weight, or by social maturity, or by sports skill, so there isn't any good basis for grouping them by age when we could group them by achieved subject-matter level, and have each class in each subject proceed through the lessons just as rapidly as learners can with the best matching instruction.

</comment><comment><USER18> Meh, I don't think a longer school year is the solution to the "summer slide." It would be better to find a way to ensure that kids are motivated to learn on their own, even over the summer, and to encourage them to engage in beneficial activities... and, of course, we need to find ways to promote the creation of more summer activities for kids that are both fun and educational, and to make sure kids have access to books, Internet, etc. over the summer.

Now that I think about it, I just realized that - for those cities with hackerspaces - this is a role hackerspaces could help with substantially. Timing some fun, educational opportunities to correspond with "summer break" could give kids a chance to do something like a "learn to solder" session, "electronics kit building", maybe some "intro to computer programming" thing, etc., etc.

Note to self: talk to the other SplatSpace'ers and see if we can cook something up for next summer...

</comment><comment><USER19> I've gotten to the point of beyond jaded when it comes to articles damning how fucked up the US public education system is. Not because people are constantly beating a dead horse but because these articles will often be about one glaring facet which is obviously a problem but is, from a mile-high view one of the MANY problems that afflict public education.

With all these voices screaming from every corner and Arne Duncan clueless in Washington, it's like watching a sinking ship with the crew not rallying to save each other, but instead scurrying up to the crow's nest to save themselves, beating back others from trying to reach it first.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'd say it's not necessarily the length of the school year but the size of summer break being several months. Teachers spend a lot of time getting kids back up to speed in the fall. Lengthening breaks during the school year and compensating by trimming summer break down would be wise.

<comment><USER21> I agree. My son just started kindergarten this year and they get 3 breaks of 1 week or more in addition to all of the national holidays & teacher work days. But they only seem to get about 9 weeks off during the summer.

Regardless of what changes are made, though, some people won't like the new schedule. It's just a fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> As someone suggested I think that rather than having one really long break there should be more small breaks in between. When I was in middle school I remember one year we were taught how to write in cursive. Summer came and I forgot it completely. We can't expect children to practice and maintain skills they don't even understand the value of over breaks (not that cursive is particularly valuable).

<comment><USER23> > _We can't expect children to practice and maintain skills they don't even > understand the value of over breaks._ //

Why not?

My eldest is 7 and I've done regular reading, spelling, writing and arithmetic with him over summer. A little science, lots of nature study, etc.. Sure the motivation hasn't really come from him, though he does like to read. One spends most of the time at parks or in the woods or whatever (for us it has to be anything free) but education doesn't end - or at least isn't somehow disallowed - when the school bell rings.

Schools are a service that you use to aid education (though some would say otherwise!) and not a place you go and have an education handed to you. I'll take one education please, make it snappy.

I wonder whether the break serves a function as far as spaced repetition goes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Quantity != quality.

If poor kids need something to do over the summer, why not invest in some positive activities for them, instead of punishing everyone?

<comment><USER23> I don't even think it's about poverty necessarily; we're far worse off financially it seems than people we know on state benefits but I'd class what we've managed to do for free/low cost over the summer as being pretty enriching.

We do have a car which is essential for work but if we didn't have to run it then we'd still be able to make the trips we do - with extra arrangements and some extra time - and be no worse off financially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> No, we really don't. In fact, I would love to see the amount of time students need to put into school maxed at 8 hours a day. None of this go to school and then spend 3 hours on homework during the night. No adult would put up with that crud except under hard economic conditions or ownership stake.

All they will do with the extra days is add more grunt work. We need to rebuild the system and giving them extra days is just a poor excuse. Summer is the time for something else. Many kids still farm or go to summer camps. I learnt chemistry during the summer far better than what was taught later in school.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's already common knowledge that not every child learns the same way - it's a product of both genetics and environment. My wife teaches in a district that has a good mix of middle-class and disadvantaged students. When summer is over, the teachers see huge discrepancies between the kids whose parents worked with them over the summer and the ones who didn't - and the economic class isn't what's dictating that discrepancy. It's unfortunate that some parents can't accept the responsibility of continuing their child's education outside of school, but if that's the case, maybe the best bet is to let the districts - not the state or federal governments dictate the curriculum and schedule.

This would put more responsibility on school boards, superintendents and administration. Underperforming administrators no longer can just sit back and play with politics and cronyism - they will have to accept the responsibility of creating and maintaining an environment that most reflects the community demographics, or they're gone. Blaming the teachers has to stop - it's the same thing that's happening with law enforcement - "We're going to pass more laws that make your job tougher and more involved, but you're going to have to do it with less money and support. Good luck."

</comment><comment><USER27> "American educational system" is a misnomer, as it is currently only equipped to produce standardized test passers (in aggregate), not educated individuals.

However it has spawned a lucrative vertical market for NCLB grant specialists.

</comment><comment><USER28> Teachers should be paid like engineers. The job is at least as important and at least as difficult.

<comment><USER10> If you look closely they're among the highest paid people already. By the time they retire at age 50, after just 25 years of service, they've got a lifetime pension that would cost you or me over $2 million (after paying taxes) to buy an annuity to cover. That's _not_ to say they don't deserve it.

<comment><USER28> Average teacher salary in Massachusetts, one of the richest states, is $70,340. The lowest-paying town has an average of under $45K. Highest, $92.5K.

Massachusetts probably doesn't have an issue with teacher salaries.

Mississippi has a statewide average salary of under $42K.

Is it well-scaled to cost-of-living? No.

Average teacher salary in Hawaii, one of the most expensive states to live in, is $55K.

Meanwhile, a 50 yo who retires with 25 years of service gets 25% of the average of their top three year's salaries as an annual pension. To get the maximum 80% pension, you need to have at least 35 years of service at 57. Figures from Massachusetts.

<comment><USER10> > Meanwhile, a 50 yo who retires with 25 years of service gets 25% of the > average of their top three year's salaries as an annual pension.

Good info. I believe that would still put the 50 yo at > $100K annually on average during their working years, considering the cost of the equivalent annuity. (The price of an annuity increases exponentially as age at purchase decreases. In retirement they also get health insurance worth over $12K annually.) For the ones with 35 years of service it would top $150K.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I would argue that the "summer slide" is, in fact, valuable. School teaches many skills beyond academics: social conditioning, conformity to inescapable bullies, observation of strict schedules for intellectual work, strict compartmentalization of activities, coping with a homogenous social environment of people of the same level of immaturity, and so forth.

Most of these are profoundly maladaptive in the adult world. We _want_ them to forget most of that garbage. Students grow up to be civilized adults _in spite_ of these teachings, and a large summer break is a great opportunity to reconnect with humanity and the adult world.

</comment><comment><USER30> _during the summer, they lose those gains while their more advantaged peers -- whose parents can afford to arrange for summer enriching activities -- maintain theirs._

A longer school year is not the answer. We need more parents stay home to raise their kids and educate/enrich them. The media and government lies to people telling them that they need to keep up with the Jones' to be happy. Give up that new SUVs, their cable tv with HBO ETC, new clothes, restaurants, new furniture, (bigger) house, expensive vacation(s), gambling/mad money, nickel and dime expenses that add up to thousands per year, yard service, nanny, convenience items ETC. Which requires two income families.

Here is the bottom line. Either both parents work these days and/or are divorced/split/one is out of the picture. This is especially true among minorities. If men an women made good decisions and planned well. This "gap" would never happen. Look at the quality of life for minorities now compared to what it was 50 years ago. Some call this an advancement - but I call mistreating their children and forsaking their parental responsibilities in exchange for more lavish living. This is selfishness.

People used to do the right thing and stay home to further educate and raise their kids. Sure they had less possessions, they had less greed too, and were happier and more self fulfilled (they took the responsibility of parenting seriously). Now people are not even raising their own kids. Child care has them for 10 hours a day and they have them for 4. After they are 8-9 years old, they just run amok through the neighborhood. Either this or momma stays home to tend to her drug/alcohol habit, soaps and latest boyfriend/pregnancy (instead of raising her kids the right way) all while collecting welfare.

How about instead of always trying to fix schools to help those lagging behind because their parents are incompetent - why don't we sink a bunch of money into educating minorities to make better choices to begin with. It is all about prevention. It is sad how progressives and liberals have tried to replace traditional morals (stemming from out country's traditional Judeo Christian beliefs) with Condoms, birth control pills, abortion clinics, divorces without even a decent attempt at restoration, live in boyfriends, degradation of marital value and commitment ETC. Look at all the trouble it has caused. The sexual restraint and careful courtship which was traditionally practiced was quite effective for producing lasting and committed whole families. Removing the constraints of religious values actually has created far more traps for people to fall into. Now Liberals want the Government to fix things somehow. Is it possible? Can government replace God and do as good a job?

Myself - growing up in a lower middle class family, in the summer my (stay at home) mom taught us extra things to prepare us the next school year and took us to museums and landmarks occasionally for enrichment and so we would have a leg-up (or at least keep stride) on the others. We did not have or need TV or video games. My wife does the same with my kids. I had friends whose parents both worked or were in a single parent situation. Lots of them ended up failing out of school and falling by the wayside.</comment>


Streaming: a skill gap? - <AUTHOR> https://charemza.name/blog/posts/streaming/data/streaming-not-just-for-big-data/ <comment><USER2> Any time streaming data comes up, I want to point people towards some of the existing research and conceptual tooling under the name of "dataflow processing", which is functionally equivalent to stream processing.

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

There's a lot of interesting ideas which we can use to this day, albeit with some changes to work with modern programming languages and data encoding frameworks.

<comment><USER3> This area of research is fascinating - my favorite part of research in this area last 6 months is finding DAGs everywhere. More or less Dataflow models work by lifting the computational dependencies into data and breaking each compute step into a small enough piece so that they're composable and can replicate across machines arbitrarily. The dependencies between each step is usually modeled as some kind of DAG in a simple case the output of one step feeds into another. In more complex cases you have logical (if this then that) dependencies for error handling and branching cases.

I think the Dataflow paper: [https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p1792-Akidau.pdf](https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p1792-Akidau.pdf)

and the MillWheel paper in particular are good reads about the problem: [https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/41378.pdf)

What's especially interesting to me is that the same approach is used for rule/workflow engines. Although the use-cases are somewhat different and the graph structure isn't usually the same - they're still modeling compute steps in a graph just with more conditional logic.

<comment><USER4> Is DAG in this context "Directed acyclic graph"?

<comment><USER5> Indeed

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've run into plenty of situations where a streaming approach would be faster. The complexity of it always necessitates making a slower conventional version. (wait for all the data to load into memory and the operate on it) the conventional approach is easier to debug and get working. 90% of the time, the gains from streaming aren't worth the added effort.

Generally you only really get value for it when you're processing a huge data set continuously or modifying data as its being sent to the user over a websocket for a fairly lengthy bit of time.

In terms of business value, a cron job running in a high memory vps will more than satisfy and take much less time to develop.

<comment><USER7> > In terms of business value, a cron job running in a high memory vps will > more than satisfy and take much less time to develop.

Yeah, but I hate it... I've worked with a team where we had a cron job do some batch processing every night, but for some large customers it started taking ~12-15 hours to complete, and certain important user operations are locked while it's running. The solution? Running once per week starting on the weekend, with a manual trigger for customers who really need the results ASAP. Tiny effort for that easy fix and the team can continue working on new features, all-sized customers are still mostly happy, but Dijkstra would not have liked this...

<comment><USER6> I would say this is the 5% of the time where it suddenly becomes worth it to streamify. you'll already have code showing what transformations need to be done. The point is to avoid premature optimization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My favorite is Welford's Algorithm [1] which lets you compute mean and standard deviation in one pass. Every programmer should be aware of it.

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

<comment><USER9> Exactly, i deal with a few of data processing programs, wish my more experienced colleagues told me about these algorithms before, but doesn't this algorithm only compute an approximation and not the exact value ?

<comment><USER10> To about the extent that a 64-bit float can ever be said to contain an exact value, this algorithm will compute the exact value. There's no sampling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you've been around long enough, you learned to program in a severely memory-constrained environment: any solution _besides_ a streaming solution was unworkable.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I'm glad I lived through those days but also glad they are mostly over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> We have built a few streaming pipelines at my current place of work, with the standard tech (kafka-confluent, a self-hosted Schema registry, etc) operated for us by SREs.

For our use case (messages never expire, consuming logic is complex and evolves every couple of months necessitating a full replay, we're the only consumer, few 100k messages per year), we've decided that it just isn't worth the trade offs vs storing temporal data in Postgres.

The place where streaming seems to be most useful for us is for piping data from one team to any other team. That way, no one needs to quibble over database permissions, we can just hand over the topic name and say "have fun".

For internal workloads, the pain points are the ones where streaming is known to have faults: quick and easy queries on the data in the queue, ergonomics around schema evolution and topic offsets, exactly once delivery with n>1 partitions and shards, Zookeeper crapping out and dropping messages for god knows what reason.

These are all problems that Postgres solves for free.

I think streaming makes sense between teams, or if your workload is significantly different from ours, but that's just my two cents.

Kafka and friends are for sure useful tools, but they are not the be all end all they're sometimes made out to be by people who don't have to deal with them day in and out.

</comment><comment><USER14> As the author alludes to at the end, streaming is a skill, and I think that really is a big issue. A lot of us, myself included, don't immediately reach for streaming as a solution to our problems, even if it can be.

For instance, I'm working on a file-based CRDT-style distributed, journaling database (for single-user but multi-device) and the "diffs" for a single device are stored in a journal. Now in retrospect, it's obvious that I don't need to store the entire journal of diffs in memory (this is a "streaming" architecture), but on my first couple of passes, because it was easier, I stored everything in memory.

After playing around with some toy projects using my database, I realized this wouldn't scale (why load all of history into memory if you don't need it?) and not only that my system lends itself better to a "file stream", i.e. don't store everything in mem, just append to existing files or read from them as needed. Seems obvious now, but when building it out, my first inclination wasn't to do it that way.

</comment><comment><USER15> In addition to streams, Buffers confused me for longer than they should have. Unlike streams, which have an indefinite length, buffers are a fix-sized amount of binary data.

</comment><comment><USER16> The buffer size handling of stream is is handling in nodejs using a mechanism called backpressuring.

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

And nodejs's site even has a article for it.

[https://nodejs.org/es/docs/guides/backpressuring-in- streams/](https://nodejs.org/es/docs/guides/backpressuring-in-streams/)

However, even the nodejs runtime itself already provide mechanism to let you handle backpressuring easily. Most people still don't do and make their program crash when streaming target is stuck for whatever reason.

</comment><comment><USER17> I love articles like this in hacker news which teaches something specific

<comment><USER18> Got any other similar links by any chance :) ?

</comment></comment><comment> Const-me I'm not sure it's skill, more likely languages + runtime support.

When I program C#, I use streaming quite a lot, often combined with async- await for I/O. The framework also helps, e.g. all compression/encryption algorithms support asynchronous versions.

When I program C++, I tend to avoid streaming at all cost. The ergonomic is just not there. Technically doable, but will turn the code into callback hell, hard to debug and expensive to support.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm jaded. It takes one non-streaming detail in the entire system to ruin the whole thing.

Some data formats need writing a length in the header. Or reading requires metadata stored after the data. Some algorithms need two passes, or can be streamed over columns when you're getting rows.

</comment><comment><USER20> I recently rewrote some streaming code to slurping. While there are theoretical advantages to streaming, unless you really really need them the drawbacks are not worth it. My comment in the code was "Streaming is hard, memory is cheap."

<comment><USER15> It really depends on the problem space. Mobile phones and browsers only have so much memory available so you have to be mindful of memory consumption there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is also called buffering where buffer size is in bytes or messages. The string/stream size being processed using the buffer is undefined. Just new words to describe the way Unix has worked for decades.

</comment><comment><USER22> The issue is that the structures to handle streaming are not often first class (in languages other than Go, Rust, and JavaScript). And when they are, the the third party interfaces are not. Eventually your data will have to reach the DB and it would bottleneck. Nobody wants to use KV storage all the time, SQL systems and ORMs need to step up their concurrency game.

<comment><USER2> SQL systems on pretty boring hardware are capable of millions of transactions per second. The schema must simply be designed with concurrent modifications in mind (less mutation and long lived transactions).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What podcasts are you listening to? - <AUTHOR> What is on your playlist? <comment><USER5> 1\. Undone (by Gimlet Media) : A one season show about less known historical happenings.

2\. The Daily (by NYTimes) : A daily show covering what's most important in the world on that day.

3\. NPR Politics Podcast (by NPR) : Covers the political headlines of the US. They're all really smart people who really know the ins and outs of politics.

4\. FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast (by ESPN) : Mostly news about politics , but from a more data driven approach. Really funny too.

5\. Pod Save America (by Crooked Media) : Hilarious talk show from a group of former Obama administration speechwriters. Obviously left and democratic leaning, but absolutely hilarious.

6\. Pod Save The World (by Crooked Media) : A more serious show about American Foreign Policy.

7\. Civics 101 (by NHPR) - The name says it all, but I want every American citizen to be locked in a chamber and forced to listen to this. Absolutely essential to understanding the basics of how the US government works.

8\. The New Yorker Politics Podcast (by WNYC Studios/The New Yorker) : Really well rounded show, a recent episode on Mattis is a must listen.

<comment><USER6> If you like the above and want some high-level academic analysis on the legal/geopolitical aspects of the week's events:

\- Foreign Policy's Editor's Round Table (ER)

\- Lawfare

\- Rational Security

All are conversations with thoughtful, and politically diverse experts speaking on timely topics a few times a week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just my "must listens" to keep it simple:

      - Planet Money
      - My Dad Wrote a Porno (NSFW, obviously, but wickedly funny)
      - <USER2>
      - <USER3>
      - Entreprogrammers (original, not the spinoffs)
      - The Daily (only when they aren't doing US politics)

No developer podcasts have engaged me enough for them to be must-listens every week though there are lots of good ones such as The Changelog and Developer Tea that I dip into time to time. The typical 1-2 hour interview format does not work for me at all, I need tight editing and some pace and structure around stories.

</comment><comment><USER8> I can recommend:

The People's Pharmacy -- A pharmacologist and a medical anthropologist host an hour long show each week, usually on one medical topic (sometimes, a melange). Their guests are top notch experts, e.g. head of whatever cardiological at the Cleveland Clinic (one of the top cardiovascular centers in the U.S.). They also cover topics/changes sometimes years before they filter into "general knowledge" and reporting. Such as the problems with statins. Or, lately, how "Lyme Disease" is not always a simple diagnosis nor treatment and also the symptomology and sometimes diagnosis is really capturing a variety of infections by a variety of pathogens -- ticks carry many, and individual responses vary.

On the Media -- an hour long show each week. Much of it is "meta", about what is appearing in the media, and what isn't, and why. Helping listeners know and understand "why they are saying that" and "why aren't they talking about this other thing -- hey, there's this other thing!"

I've not been so attentive to it of late, but there's also WBEZ's "Worldview". Extended interviews with experts about world topics. You'll often get information and perspective you won't find anywhere in the mainstream media.

P.S. If you're on Android, the AntennaPod app is a nice, open source podcast app.

</comment><comment><USER9> You might get some interesting feedback from: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836023](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836023)

I know its an old post, but I guess you can still listen to most of this stuff.

If you are interested in more recent (but less popular posts) check this out:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14471209](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14471209)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14403285](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14403285)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14188018](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14188018)

</comment><comment><USER10> Surprised no one has mentioned The Tim Ferris Show. That's my #1 right now. He's got a really eclectic but also well thought out guest list and I learn something useful every episode. His recent episode with Nick Szabo was the crash course on cryptocurrency that I always wanted. Highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER11> Talking Machines. It's definitely a bit over my head, but it's a really good podcast about Machine Learning, with heaps of interviews and pretty in depth conversations.

</comment><comment><USER12> My Pocketcasts List:

Dev:

      All Javascript Podcasts from DevChat.tv

      Tools Day

History:

      Hardcore History

      History of the Crusades

      History of the Papacy

      Revolutions

      The British History Podcast

      The Civil War: A History Podcast

      The History of Byzantium

      The History of Egypt

      The History of England

      The History if Islam

      Maritime history Podcast

      When Diplomacy Fails

Video Games:

      Gamers with Job Conference Call

      Crucible Radio (Destiny)

      Giant Bombcast

      Idle Weekend

      Rebel FM

      The Dive LoL Podcast

      The Giant Beastcast

      The Magic Hour

      The Bungie Podcast

      Three Moves Ahead

      Waypoint Radio

      Wild Weasel

Random:

      Shift+F1

      The Steve Austin Show

I'm sure you can draw some conclusions about my hobbies/interests.

</comment><comment><USER13> Longform Podcast entertains me with a variety of guests, who is typically a writer, a editor, or a journalist, invited for each episodes. With dialogues about their work and career, it gives a glimpse of a life of those who work in the media industry. The podcast is a oral history of media workers, and it often gives valuable insights to just listen to interviews and see interviewees as they are.

Facing challenges like fake news, Google AMP, FaceBook InstantArticle, and the like, some of you may be interested.

[https://longform.org/podcast](https://longform.org/podcast)

</comment><comment><USER14>
      * "Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night; all day!"
      * StarTalk Radio Show by Neil deGrasse Tyson
      * Adam & Dr. Drew Show
      * NPR Up First
      * How Stuff Works
      * Darn Carlin's Hardcore History
      * Michael Blanks' Apartment Investing Podcast
      * Reasonable Doubt with Mark Garagos and Adam Carolla
      * Weekly Infusion

<comment><USER15> Seconded. Who'd thunk a comic with a bro-schtick would end up hosting such a thought-provoking podcast?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Trying not to repeat too much popular podcasts everybody already mentioned, I would add:

      - Fresh Air (NPR) [various subjects]
      - Intercepted with Jeremy Scahill [The Intercept fame]
      - Profile (BBC) [profile peoples, mainly Uk]
      - Sporting Witness (BBC) [sport related]
      - Recode Media with Peter Kafka [interview media people]
      - Reliable Sources with Brian Stelter [about media, political]
      - State of the Union with Jake Tapper [political]
      - The Axe Files with David Axelrod [interview politics]
      - The Forward by Lance Armstrong [mostly NOT sport]
      - Twenty Thousand Hertz [about sounds]
      - Larry Wilmore: Black on the Air [new]
      - The Bill Simmons Podcast [mainly sports]
      - Inside The Times [nyt related]
      - The Internet Podcast History [about Internet golden age]
      - War College (Reuters) [military stuffs]
      - Grammar Girl
      - Whistlestop [politics, history]
      - BackStory with the American History [history]

</comment><comment><USER17> Talking Machines : A podcast where they outline new developments in Machine Learning and interview people in the field. Has a good balance of summarizing the important points without leaving out technical details.

[http://www.thetalkingmachines.com](http://www.thetalkingmachines.com)

</comment><comment><USER18> I haven't seen anyone mention Exponent yet. It's basically Stratechery, the podcast.

</comment><comment><USER19> Ones I haven't seen anyone mention:

Infinite Monkey Cage (sciencey and funny) Judge John Hodgman (funny) Marketplace with Kai Ryssdal (financial) The Skeptics Guide to the Universe (science)

Ones not mentioned enough: On The Media (media/politics) Reply All (internet culture)

</comment><comment><USER20> Primarily security related podcasts.

1\. Defensive Security 2\. Branding Down Security 3\. Risky Business 4\. SANS Internet Storm Center 5\. Southern Fried Security

Some non security related ones... Hardcore History, Common Sense, and on a much lighter note, The Comedy Button

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't listen to tech podcasts. Since it's E3 time of year, I've got a bunch of Giant Bombcasts slated for next week. I'm also listening to Kevin Smith do commentary on Frasier episodes...

</comment><comment><USER22> The weeds. It's a podcast about public policy and politics. Very technical which I like.

FiveThirtyEight politics for politics.

Voices of vr. Excellent podcast about VR news often with interviews the developers working on the cutting edge.

<comment><USER23> I'll second FiveThirtyEight. I was a little skeptical about this mag that seemed to come out from nowhere. It always has very interesting content.

<comment><USER24> while we're at it, Nate's book The Signal and the Noise is a pretty easy and fun read if you're into statistics, polling and politics

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25>
        - Radio Lab
        - Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History
        - Linear Digressions
        - Hidden Brain
        - FiveThirtyEight's Hot Takedown
        - FiveThirtyEight's Politics
        - <USER4>
        - Planet Money
        - 99% Invisible
        - Neil Tyson's StarTalk
        - NYT's The Daily
        - Talk Python To Me
        - The Changelog
        - Hello Internet

There's a few other Machine Learning/Data Science-ish "podcasts", some other NPR ones, and This American Life.

I didn't realize that I spend so much time on this.

</comment><comment><USER26> I like to listen to podcasts mostly related to outside hobbies and interests to keep my mind, ideas, and thoughts fresh.

Here are my favorites:

\- 8-4 Play (bi-weekly)

\- Giant Bombcast (Premium) (weekly)

\- Giant Beastcast (Premium) (weekly)

\- ThirtyTwentyTen (weekly)

\- Talking Simpson's (weekly)

\- NPR Pop Culture Happy Hour (weekly)

\- Slash Filmcast (weekly)

\- Axe of the Blood God (weekly; Video Game Japanese RPG podcast by USGamer columnists)

I also pay for Giant Bomb premium (it's cheap) and gives you premium video's and ad free podcasts and supports the site. I also like the hosts and have been following them for years.

</comment><comment><USER27> Breaker for iOS does a good job of recommending episodes and podcasts based on your likes and friends. I recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't know about other people, but I'm constantly overwhelmed by podcast recommendation threads. People recommend podcasts that each have hundreds of episodes. I certainly won't listen to all of them just to catch up.

What I want is a list of must-listen episodes and short series. Does such a thing exist?

<comment><USER29> When starting a new podcast I normally listen to the newest one. Then it depends on the style. News/current events podcasts, just listen to new ones. Others, browse the history and cherry pick ones that sound interesting or download them all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I am a political scientist by education, working in a planetarium.

\- Downloadable Content, the Penny Arcade Podcast

\- The West Wing Weekly

\- GovLove (from ELGL, about local government)

\- Pod Save America

\- Main Engine Cut Off (about launch vehicles)

\- Are We There Yet? (general news about space exploration)

\- Orbital Path with Michelle Thaler (recent space/astrophysics news)

\- Skytalk with Dave Heller and Derrick Pitts (astronomy news)

</comment><comment><USER31> -a16z podcast is my #1 podcast these days

-Tim Ferris Show is a little hit or miss but has some excellent content

-Linear Digressions is a fun little podcast to stay caught up on ML trends

-How I Built This is a more general audience oriented podcast that talks about how companies got started

</comment><comment><USER32> TigerBelly by comedian Bobby Lee [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIyIoM_Nd8HtY19fuR_ov2A/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIyIoM_Nd8HtY19fuR_ov2A/videos)

</comment><comment><USER28> Let's say I pick one of these recommendations. What happens next? Where do I start?

Should I listen to all episodes in chronological order? Should I only listen to new episodes? Should I cherry pick episodes based on their description?

</comment><comment><USER33> My favorites: \- Go Time \- Coding Blocks \- The Changelog \- JavaScript Jabber

</comment><comment><USER34> I wonder if we could automate this "Ask HN" in a similar manner as "Who's hiring? ($MONTH $YEAR)". It seems to be popping up with about the same regularity.

</comment><comment><USER35> True Crime \- Last Podcast on the Left \- Criminal \- Crimetown

Random Info \- Radiolab \- 99% Invisible

Interviews \- WTF w/ Marc Maron \- Joe Rogan (depending on the guest) \- The Nerdist (depending on the guest)

</comment><comment><USER36> In no specific order:

My brother my brother and me

Hardcore history

Science friday

Software engineering daily

Data skeptic

Linear digressions

Math mutation

Omega tau

I've listened to a ton more, but I tend to get tired of some and move onto others. I used to love radiolab and this american life, but find them kind of annoying now.

</comment><comment><USER37> I've been enjoying 1A from NPR lately.

I haven't really found any tech podcasts I like yet, they mostly talk about things at a very surface level, which doesn't teach me a lot.

</comment><comment><USER38> Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman ([https://mastersofscale.com/](https://mastersofscale.com/))

</comment><comment><USER39> I have a long drive to and from work during which I like to stop thinking about work. So...

\- The Splendid Table: Because food is important.

\- Retronauts: Retrogaming in all its glory.

</comment><comment><USER40> None. I find reading much more efficient.

</comment><comment><USER41> Garbage - [https://garbage.fm/](https://garbage.fm/)

</comment><comment><USER42> Thought I'd add my own pod to this great list. I certainly listen to it :)

This Week in Machine Learning & AI

</comment><comment><USER43> For people who like to read genre fiction, I'd recommend The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

</comment><comment><USER44> [https://talking-tech.io](https://talking-tech.io)

</comment><comment><USER45> You Bet Your Garden by Mike McGrath. Feels good to hear something completely unrelated to tech

</comment><comment><USER46> None. I don't listen to podcasts. Not really sure why. I do watch talks etc. on YouTube.

<comment><USER47> I also stopped listening to podcasts (after listening to them for years), and wonder why I stopped, and also watch a lot of talks on YouTube. I found that simply learned a LOT more useful information from talks on YouTube than from podcasts. Often podcasts are full of nicely produced and entertaining BS, whereas technical talks on YouTube are full of not-so-well produced but genuinely high quality content. The latter is worth much more to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Contra Krugman History of Byzantium Ringer NFL GM Tim Ferris Tom Woods Show

</comment><comment><USER49> EconTalk

</comment><comment><USER50> Mine is kind of an odd mix (most is strictly for entertainment:

\- Criminal

\- Eaten by a Grue

\- Freakonomics Radio

\- Geek's Guide to the Galaxy

\- Liar City

\- S-Town (just one season)

\- Seeking Wisdom

\- Serial

\- Startup School

\- Startups for the Rest of Us

\- Tank Riot

\- Techzilla

\- The Dollop

\- The Memory Palace

\- The Truth

\- Thimbleweed Park

\- This American Life

\- This Week in Tech

\- ycombinator

</comment><comment><USER51> Hello to Jason Isaacs.

</comment><comment><USER52> \- hardcore history

\- revolutions

\- Hannibal and the Punic wars

\- Arab spring: a history

\- The Ancient World

\- The history of Byzantium

</comment><comment><USER53> At the top of my list would be:

\- Opening Arguments

\- Invisibilia

\- StartUp- 99% Invisible

\- RadioLab

\- RadioLab Presents: More Perfect

\- Freakonomics Radio

Others:

\- Hidden Brain

\- Vox's The Weeds

\- How I Built This

\- Myths and Legends

</comment><comment><USER54> 1\. Startups for the Rest of Us

2\. How I Built This

3\. .NET Rocks

4\. Bootstrapped Web

5.The Indie Hackers Podcast

</comment><comment><USER55> How I built this

Foundation (Kevin Rose's podcast)

</comment><comment><USER56> \- brain of Britain (halfway between Jeopardy and trivial pursuit) \- econtalk: where else can you hear about someone who hypothesized that sweatshops were good and then proved himself wrong? \- changelog \- the Bernie Sanders show \- on being \- waking up with Sam Harris. Strongly disagree with Harris programmatically, but damn if he's not a good philosopher. "What is technology doing to us" is very good. But his islamophobic rants can be difficult to stomach.

</comment><comment><USER57> At the moment, nothing. I'm in a "mostly music" kind of mood.

</comment><comment><USER58> Here's my playlist. First the good ones that are actively in my queue (in general order of recommendation):

\- The Memory Palace: [http://thememorypalace.us/](http://thememorypalace.us/) (these are stunningly good historical stories)

\- On the Media: [http://www.wnyc.org/shows/otm/](http://www.wnyc.org/shows/otm/)

\- Reply All: [https://gimletmedia.com/reply- all/](https://gimletmedia.com/reply-all/) (this is the one I expected to see on every list at hackernews, and don't)

\- The Gist: [http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/gist.html](http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/gist.html)

\- The Daily: [https://www.nytimes.com/column/the- daily](https://www.nytimes.com/column/the-daily)

\- 99% Invisible: [http://99percentinvisible.org/](http://99percentinvisible.org/)

\- Economist Radio: [https://radio.economist.com/](https://radio.economist.com/)

\- New Yorker Radio Hour: [http://www.wnyc.org/shows/tnyradiohour/](http://www.wnyc.org/shows/tnyradiohour/)

\- Planet Money: [http://www.npr.org/sections/money/](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/) (not the juggernaut of content they once were)

\- This American Life: [https://www.thisamericanlife.org/](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/)

Shorter series (or just defunct or really rarely updated) that I can recommend to this crowd:

\- Zachtronics Podcast: [http://www.zachtronics.com/podcast/](http://www.zachtronics.com/podcast/)

\- Revisionist History: [http://revisionisthistory.com/](http://revisionisthistory.com/) (should be starting a new season soon)

\- Mystery Show: [https://gimletmedia.com/mystery- show/](https://gimletmedia.com/mystery-show/)

\- A Life Well Wasted: [http://alifewellwasted.com/](http://alifewellwasted.com/) (great videogamey series)

\- Containers: [https://www.flexport.com/blog/alexis-madrigal-containers- pod...](https://www.flexport.com/blog/alexis-madrigal-containers-podcast/)

\- S-Town: [https://stownpodcast.org/](https://stownpodcast.org/)

Listening at 1.8x for most of these shows forces me to pay attention, and let's me consume more content. The exception is for The Memory Palace which deserves to be heard exactly as Nate makes it (1x).

</comment><comment><USER59> The Bikeshed <USER3>
World Cafe

Mountain Stage

Snap Judgement

</comment><comment><USER60> Joe Rogan Experience

The Good Fight

Rational Security

Bombshell

Risky Business

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Conversations with Tyler

EconTalk

The Ezra Klein Show

The Weeds

The Tim Ferriss Show

Software Engineering Daily

Deep State Radio

<comment><USER22> I really wish ezra and Sam Harris would do a podcast and resolve this "feud"

<comment><USER60> I'm ambivalent.

I sense a lot of sanctimonious posturing and more-liberal-than-thou attitude when it comes to Sam Harris, and Klein is hardly the first to equivocate over him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> harmontown</comment>


Enabling 64-bit VM support on a HP Probook - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/SysAdmins/Hardware/enabling-64-bit-vm-support

<comment><USER2> TFA may be too specific for the interests of this audience. Thanks for documenting this with good screenshots.</comment>


Failed SquadGoals: Spotify doesn't use the Spotify model and neither should you - <AUTHOR> https://www.jeremiahlee.com/posts/failed-squad-goals/?hn <comment><USER2> Websites that override my scrolling are almost as obnoxious as sites that auto-play audio/video.

<comment><USER3> I used CSS's proximity snapping. It doesn't override your scroll, but it does snap the top of a section if the section is relatively close to the top of the screen when you stop scrolling. It works much better in Firefox and Safari than Chromium. For large screen viewing, the layout is intended to take up the full screen.

I am experimenting with magazine layouts and editorial design. I'm sorry if you don't like it. That's ok. I created this for me and just decided to let people in.</comment></comment>


HTC plans to 'fully defend itself' against Apple's patent suit - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/03/htc_plans_to_fully_defend_itself_against_apples_patent_suit.html?ana=from_rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TechFlash+%28TechFlash+-+Seattle%27s+Technology+News+Source%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><AUTHOR> FTA:

"HTC disagrees with Apple's actions and will fully defend itself. HTC strongly advocates intellectual property protection and will continue to respect other innovators and their technologies as we have always done, but we will continue to embrace competition through our own innovation as a healthy way for consumers to get the best mobile experience possible."</comment>


Ask HN: Did AWS give you access to EKS(ECS for Kubernetes)? - <AUTHOR> I am just wondering if people have access to the AWS EKS (Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes)? I signed up when it was announced and haven't heard anything yet.<p>People that have access could you share your experience with it? <comment><USER2> If they did, it's a veritable certainty that that fact would be under NDA.</comment>