Working On-Site Considered Harmful - <AUTHOR> http://markmaunder.com/2016/02/16/remote-working/ <comment><USER2> I have been working remotely for over ten years. I agree with most of what OP Mark says.

There is one big caveat, however. Without specific measures to address the issue, working remotely is experienced as very isolating. Therefore, it requires local co-working spaces, such as work cafés, where people can still socialize once in a while with others.

It also requires the remote workers to have some kind of minimum social hygiene. People who at least have a significant other, or possibly even children, and good relations with other family members and/or friends, will do fine.

There are other people, however, who are such rampant individualists that they have absolutely nobody else in their social lives than their colleagues at work. If they start working remotely, they will really see nobody at all during the day. That is not feasible, year in year out.

Therefore, in absence of specific measures to address the issue, remote working may reinforce the dangerous contemporary trend to extreme individualization.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree this is a real issue. I've worked remotely for years and the thing I had to get over was getting on weird sleep cycles. You work later and wake later until you're day sleeping and you can detach from the rest of the World.

The one thing that makes this easier is having a team I find. They keep you on a regular schedule and provide companionship.

But I'm aware of the problems that can creep in and I chat individually to our team about it regularly. Today I did a call with someone checking in to find out if they have decided if they want to get office space in town to work from or shared space. (They decided against it) Also to find out if they need any furniture for their office (they may get a standing/sitting desk or an exercise ball) and to schedule them going to a conference to get out of the "office".

We're still figuring this stuff out and I think as we go the main thing is communication - checking in periodically, chatting about it and sharing ideas to make remote working awesome rather than a chore or problematic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> LOL security???

That code doesn't belong on a computer that ever connects to the internet.</comment>


No more tricks : Doing the right thing for the customer. No excuses. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cobot.me/post/18549756814/no-more-tricks

<comment><USER2> I think this should be modified to say "Doing the right thing, period."

Doing whatever your customer says 100% of the time isn't good practice, as it inevitably results in bloated products.

The key is to always _listen_ to your customer, considering their opinion, but selectively act on their feedback.</comment>


Google Font Directory - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/webfonts

<comment><USER3> Why haven't they gotten the League of Moveable Type on board here?

<http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/>

Seriously, Chunk Five and League Gothic would be some great additions to this list.

<comment><USER4> We're reaching out to a number of open source font developers so I bet they have been contacted. I'll inquire. I think the current priorities are international language fonts actually, but other beautiful fonts are still welcome.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the insight; that clears up a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google Web Fonts or @font-face are great leap towards better web typography but sadly that's not the only piece of puzzle that needs to be solved.

Every OS, and every browser on that OS renders text differently. Read this for more on that: <http://24ways.org/2009/real-fonts-and-rendering>

I recently wrote a silly article, mainly to see how the typography will shape the whole feel of the webpage at <http://www.sushaantu.com/moustache.html> It looks awesome to me on my Ubuntu Chromium 7 but sucks on Firefox 3 of Windows and OSX.

Google Font Directory is indeed a great thing to make web little more beautiful but we need support from OS and browsers as well which are making steady pace.

<comment><USER6> That looks great on OS X and Safari but the fake italics are just wrong. Don't know why you would say that it sucks.

– edit: Ah, that font doesn't have a italic or bold variant, that explains it. Now I don't know what could possibly be wrong with the rendering in OS X.

<comment><USER5> I'm glad it doesn't suck on your browser :)

<comment><USER7> I am rocking Chromium and it seems to render fine on mine as well. I do however, agree that there needs to be some text rendering continuity between browsers.

It really is a shame that maybe tops, 5 people are talking in this thread and most of us are seeing different renders

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Artemy Lebedev on Google Font Directory:

"This is, unfortunately, total f--kup.

Alas, besides Apple, all consortiums and big companies totally lack font culture. Microsoft is getting on a bit better - the fonts they ship are good by themselves, - but all the same they f--k up ratserizing and typography in the system.

To make sure of this, it takes only to open the same page on Mac, PC and some Linux. The question will stand no longer.

Google traditionally had failed at design. Founders' standard of ideas doesn't exceed American office aesthetics. Hence various holiday pictures, hence shadow under the logo, hence given fonts. All of them are done by the standard of free font collections and present samples of extremely low quality. Namely student's amateur crap.

Fonts are so horrible, that I just want to sit down, cover my face with my hands and cry helplessly. As it will circulate million-strong, people will think that you can do it like this. These fonts will be used.

(Cries)"

translation by me, original: Business Lynch, 24 May 2010 ([http://www.artlebedev.ru/kovodstvo/business- lynch/2010/05/24...](http://www.artlebedev.ru/kovodstvo/business- lynch/2010/05/24/))

Artemy Lebedev is a founder and art director of the most prominent design studio in Russia, known for their attention to typesetting.

Art.Lebedev Studio have on their site a running daily feature called Business Lynch, where since September 2006 they do review and critique of one specimen of design, submitted by the site's readers. Reviews are done in informal manner and widely range in style.

<comment><USER4> That article's totally backwards. The rendering is nothing to do with Google (unless you're viewing on Chrome :P). Microsoft has a fairly good font group internally and has made some great progress.

Google is just getting started (I'm part of the fonts effort there) and there are fairly respected designers involved in the whole effort. Without buying in licenses it will take some time to reach a certain quality level but a lot of the fonts provided are high quality and have received praise as such - <USER2> quote implies they're all Wingdings :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's a handy flowchart of @font-face scenarios: <http://typophile.com/node/70216>

</comment><comment><USER10> I was a big fan when this was first announced, but the selection of fonts is puny ... try typekit instead. <http://typekit.com/> ... there's a free plan.

</comment><comment><USER11> My favorite place for this kind of thing is font squirrel.

<comment><USER12> The advantage of this is that google provides the bandwidth, all they need is more fonts for this to be useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why are all the fonts on that page rendered so badly?

It's artifacts all the way down.

(Chrome 7 on Windows 7)

<comment><USER3> No offense, but because you're using Windows 7.

It's mentioned later in the thread, but this image explains everything: <http://typophile.com/node/70216>

Short answer: Windows has always had crappy font rendering. (Though some people like/prefer it for whatever reason. I'm not one of them.) It's going to get better eventually – look at the image for IE9 and FF 3.7.

You may also want to be sure you have Cleartype on.

Maybe it's my own status as a Mac user, but it's almost distracting to see the differences in font rendering between platforms.

<comment><USER3> To the person who downvoted me because I dared criticized Windows' font rendering: That's not nice. :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> These do not work in IE! I tried.</comment>


Illuminating the Effects of Light Pollution - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/07/science/light-pollution-effects-environment.html <comment><USER2> I moved to one of the darkest spots in California (actually just submitted to Apply HN as I want to make a tech park there).

So many people in so cal haven't experienced a true night sky - it's like seeing the ocean for the first time if you don't live near the coast.

Even people who have been to dark spots often don't think about how they need to observe without a moon in the sky and that they need to give their eyes enough time to adjust to the dark (lots of people KNOW about this but for some reason don't think about it when they are camping)</comment>


7 Tips for viral marketing - <AUTHOR> http://www.baekdal.com/articles/Branding/viral-marketing-tricks/ Thomas Baekdal lists 7 tipps for successful viral marketing. <comment><USER2> Come on now, link to the original: [http://www.baekdal.com/articles/Branding/viral-marketing- tri...](http://www.baekdal.com/articles/Branding/viral-marketing-tricks/)

</comment><comment><USER3> So, who else feels that "viral" marketing is past its sell-by date?

It now seems too willfully hip, and more conniving than clever.</comment>


The death of CPU scaling: From one core to many — and why we're still stuck - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/116561-the-death-of-cpu-scaling-from-one-core-to-many-and-why-were-still-stuck <comment><USER2> So how many times do we get this story? Interestingly Herb Sutter wrote about it here:

<http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm>

And then he updated that here: <http://herbsutter.com/welcome-to-the-jungle/> and we commented on it here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3502223>

Then the Extreme Tech guys rip off the graphics and write about it again. (personally they should have given Herb a link but whatever)

Both Herb's article(s) and this one strike me like someone looking at an approaching storm front and detailing how much water is likely to to come raining down when it breaks. That is accurate information but ultimately useless.

One answer is that existing architectures will work better on new materials (carbon for example) because they can dissipate more heat (so keep your eye on the research about doping graphene wires into silicon or creating diamond substrates.

"Web 2.0" is all about new ways of computing which exploit parallelism. And while I don't see a lot of benefit in Google inventing a new language to express it (Go), the challenge is real. Folks have been designing chips which are essentially parallel at the transistor level. Little of that research has yet to percolate into the software architectures being proposed.

Its one thing to say "The gas tank is about 3/4 empty, start looking for gas stations." and another to just go on and on about all the ways the remaining gas in your car is going to be consumed down to fumes :-)

<comment><USER3> You wrote, '"Web 2.0" is all about new ways of computing which exploit parallelism.'

I've seen many descriptions of "Web 2.0" but that's a new one to me. Or to quote Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Here's Tim O'Reilly's explanation: <http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is- web-20.html>

<comment><USER2> Web 1.0 was bigger and bigger SMP servers, Sun was that 'dot' in "Dot Com" and "Grid" was the thing.

Web 2.0 is Beowulf type and other shared nothing clusters where the only 'fabric' between processes is the network and the parallelism and the service API is an emergent property of the cluster of servers not of any one server.

Web 2.0 is where you can run a web application locally in some co-location facility that is pulling its data off the S3 cloud at Amazon across the country.

Web 2.0 is the difference between a SQL server that creaks under the load of a million queries per day and a noSQL cluster that does billions of queries a day.

A looooooong time ago I challenged Sun's executive management with the question "What are we going to do when a 'big yellow hose'[1] runs through everyone's living room?", Eric Schmidt (who was the senior director of the Systems Group at the time) felt the challenge was a bit over the top since getting 10 megabits of network bandwidth to everyone's house wasn't really on anybody's road map (and we had just done a deal with AT&T which thinking that _maybe_ in 10 years 30% of the households would have an ISDN line). I had just come up for air after looking at how to build a network service that, like the Andrew File System, didn't exist on any one server, it existed on all servers. That was one of those 'oh wow' moments, sort of a 'we are all under-estimating this' kinda thing.

So for me the explosion of bandwidth was the fundamental moving force behind the evolution of the web, you _could_ assume that data could be on the far side of the country and you'd have a chance of getting it to show to the user before they died of boredom. And when that is true, what were the boundaries of the system then? What were the invariants?

Working at Google, and now Blekko, is hugely exciting because the friction between data sets is so much lower you can do awesome things. So my 'backplane' can be 4,000 sq ft of data center and I can fit a whole lot of machines into that 4,000 sq ft, and I can easily give everyone of them a small piece of a problem. Or the same problem where different things are assumed to be true. And they can all return their answers and those answers can be correlated, evaluated, formatted, and outputted in the blink of an eye. That I contend is Web 2.0.

[1] At the time the long haul version of 10 megabit ethernet was a large diameter yellow cable with marks where you could install vampire taps.

<comment><USER4> Web 1.0 was the web as a publishing platform with a sprinkling of limited applications that do all of their heavy lifting on the backend. Web 1.0 was about cgi-bin, it was about lycos and yahoo and mapquest, it was about geocities and "under construction" pages and Fortune 500 companies with static websites consisting of a handful of pages, none of them terribly interesting.

Web 2.0 was a dramatic reshaping of what was possible with the web. It was about the web as a full-fledged application and communication platform. Web 2.0 was about AJAX, and web-mail, and wikis, and blogging and commenting, and google maps, and sites with social features, etc.

In the Web 1.0 era if you wanted to share information with the world you bought some hosting and you set up your own site where you put up a handful of hand-edited html pages. If people wanted to have a conversation with you on the web they would have to email you or make a comment on their own site. In the Web 2.0 era you turned to one of many platforms (blogger, wordpress, web forums, livejournal, etc.) and you started blogging, or making podcasts, or making web comics, or doing whatever suited your fancy. And to have a conversation people used the same medium, they commented on your blog posts or they talked to you on a forum, or they commented on your flickr photos, etc.

Fundamentally web 1.0 is about static data from a handful of authors, web 2.0 is about dynamic data from a myriad of contributors.

Most of Web 2.0 runs on ordinary PHP and MySQL servers, the SQL vs. NoSQL division doesn't play a part in it.

<comment><USER5> I think Web2.0 was when many things started going super-linear.

1 customer isn't just another customer, they are more SEO, more content, more "Likes", more network effect.

It's also about standardization (which is also kind of super-linear) - if you code to a standard interface, you no longer need to code to every interface.

I'm not such a fan of AJAX. You can make a punch-the-monkey game in AJAX, and it's just web 1.0 all over again. You could be something like Facebook with little more than static HTML. AJAX is a tool, not a revolution. It's a good tool, but that's it. The same goes for NoSQL servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For a perspective from CPU designers, checkout the talk given at Standford by Bob Colwell on Feb 18, 2004. It is about half way down this page titled "Things CPU Architects need to think about":

<http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/ay0304.html>

Bob lead the Pentium Pro effort all the way through the Pentium 4. The talk is funny, fascinating, includes history (like how pointless that change was that led to the Pentium FDIV bug), how the Itanium was approved, change, bugs and many other things.

In the Q&A session at the end, one of the questioners is Dave Ditzel who headed Transmeta.

<comment><USER7> defcon switzerland had a reverse engineer talking about x86 ISA and all its weird cornercases/cruft

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJvsshovITE>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If memristors pan out they're likely to be the "next step forward" for the near future. There are some very big single-threaded wins to be had by incorporating them into CPU design, even if it's a relatively brute-force integration into existing architecture like making a very large, fast cache.

<comment><USER9> Precisely. These articles are inevitably too narrowly focused on the von Neuman architecture, which at this point is relatively old technology. Memrister computation architecture will be radically different, and orders of magnitude more powerful once they pass the initial economy of scale hurdle.

<comment><USER10> Maybe I'm just locked into an old model, but I still haven't found anything or anyone who has actually been able to satisfactorily explain why they believe this to be the case, beyond "Because it will be!".

<comment><USER4> Quite plainly, memristors are the most exciting invention in electronics since the transistor.

Our current understanding of memristors is that they have the capability to offer non-volatile storage at densities of flash or higher with speeds near that of SRAM. This alone provides several very simple implications. First, replacement of non-volatile storage systems with memristor based storage with much faster transfer speeds than what we have today. Second, replacement of main memory and CPU data and instruction caches with memristor storage. This would allow for systems that can be kept in "hibernation" for indefinite periods of time and transfer between being awake and being completely off in a matter of nanoseconds. This would vastly improve battery life for mobile devices and power efficiency for all devices. Additionally, it would vastly speed up the typical "fetch, process, write" cycle of most computations, improving overall computing power with equivalent logic hardware by huge margins. Imagine if programs didn't need to be loaded in memory because there was no difference between main memory and the "hard disk". Third, memristors can be used to create FPGA like devices which approach the space and power efficiency as well as performance of custom ASICs. That is a revolutionary concept. Imagine if you had a bank of programmable logic the size of your graphic card's GPU capable of transforming itself in a fraction of a second between given hardware configurations. That alone would fundamentally change computing as we know it. Fourth, potentially all of this stuff can be put onto a single chip, which would dramatically lower the cost and further shrink the size of a computer system, making them even more ubiquitous than they are today. Imagine a sliver of silicon only a few square centimeters in size containing an entire CPU, plus gigabytes of L2 cache, plus reconfigurable logic with the power of a GPU, plus terabytes of non-volatile storage that also serves as RAM.

Here's the kicker, all of these things are just trivial applications of memristor technology, but the revolutionary stuff is even more astounding. Memristors are capable of being used for logic on their own, much like transistors. And it seems to be trivial to alternate between using them for memory or using them for logic. Potentially you could create a single chip containing terabytes or even petabytes of memristors and the components of the chip could easily transition between configurable logic (in a different way than the FPGA like devices mentioned above) and memory, allowing the chip to match computing power to available resources and position computing elements close to the data being used for optimal parallelism and minimum latency. Not to mention that it would enable non-von-Neumann computing architectures. The implications of this are far too heady for us to grapple with today, it implies the potential for much more advanced machine learning systems and vastly more powerful computational resources than we have ever dealt with before.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for taking the time. I am familiar with the argument that they would replace SRAM, speeding up the chip. I am familiar with the argument that they would be lower power. My frustration with the discussion has always been that faster/bigger SRAM does not equal a fundamentally different computational model or radically different architectures, which is always what memristors are claimed to bring. Sure, it could be worth a huge speedup, but what does that have to do with antiquating the von Neumann model?

I was not aware they could behave as both memory and logic; perhaps _that_ can contribute to a fundamentally different structure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "For over a decade prophets have voiced the contention that the organization of a single computer has reached its limits and that truly significant advances can be made only by interconnection of a multiplicity of computers in such a manner as to permit cooperative solution."

This now pithy statement was written by the famous Gene Amdahl in the year 1968; A time when computers ran at speeds that are dwarfed by today's digital clocks, but also it gives us insight into a time when people were still dealing with the same problems that we deal with today in developing faster and faster CPUs.

The truth of statement may be something that functionalism or parallelism advocates don't want to hear - the so called Parallelism Revolution will never come, at least not in it's current incarnation.

The end of serial advancement, and thus the parallelization revolution was "supposed" to happen in the 60s, and despite the considerable advances in methodologies of parallelization, it did not come. The 90s brought us standards and technologies like MPI which standardized procedures in developing cooperative computing solutions, but still, it did not come. The 2000s sought to simplify the very act of programming by reappropriating the ideas of programming back to the realm of pure mathematics - by representing programs as a mathematical description of time and work itself, with languages like Haskell and ML we sought to build machines which model math, and thus, the parallel nature of computation within universe itself.

I feel the curious allure of parallel computing myself, a sublime glitter of gold that is locked in the idea - It is irresistible for a curious individual. To feel as if all the power of the world is in your hands in this moment (as opposed to 20 years from now), to wipe away the frailty that underlies all of computation today; We all would like to be able to lift a trillion billion bytes into the heavens.

Theres only two problems.

The first problem lies squarely within our own human inadequacies, and it could be argued that this is where parallelism fails deepest. It is certainly true that parallelization is complex, but like all things, abstractions of complexity are nessasary, and designing the abstractions in such a way they are understandable to 'mere mortals' is a greatly undervalued aspect of technology today. So, I would posit as a result of insufficient desire to establish simplified abstractions of parallelization, to most programmers, ideas like parallelism remains in the domain of machine learning and condensed solids analysis - A kind of electronic black art, only used by those with sufficient training to know what horrors they may wrought upon the world if they're to make some trivial programming mistake. As a result (ceteris paribus!) serial power will always be valued greater than parallel computational capacity, which many have claimed to be the predominant driver of commercial development of scientific ideas.

The second problem is more controversial and is much more material, but I think time will prove it so -- Computer have managed and will continue to manage getting faster at an alarming rate. Regardless of our preconceptions about the mechanics of computation, I believe it is reasonable to say that computers will continue to get faster at exponential rates, even after the so called quantum limits of computation come into play. This is reasonable for the same reason the Normal distribution manifests itself in disparate natural phenomenon - The Central Limit Theorem. Anyone writing about 'CPU slowdown' admits that people have been saying the same thing for 70 years (Even before 'real' computers), and I fail to see where they justify their reasoning that somehow this century is different.

</comment><comment> sid-azureus Two words (Combined as one) : GreenArrays

<comment><USER12> Link?

<comment> sid-azureus didnt know which link you mean html link : <http://www.greenarraychips.com/> conceptual link : chuck moore and green arrays' philosophy has always been that you cant simply scale the cpu, you have to scale the whole computer. Make them smaller and slower and less power hungry, but REALLY parallelise the computer itself: VLSI cluster computing basically. i increasingly believe that taking this philosphy forward is the right way to go, not intels "more than moore" or whatever ARM/MIPS has up their sleeve, they are bound to hit the same walls. Yes, the flagship greenarrays product the GA144 is not really a competitor yet, just a DSP, but its 144 complete computers squeezed onto a 1cm sq chip with a 180nm process. There is a lot of potential there imho.

<comment><USER12> I meant conceptually --- I'd never heard the phrase before. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> History has been crushing the predictors of "the end" for such a long time. Why are they even trying?

<comment><USER14> Linkbait title -> page views -> ad impressions -> money, cash, hos</comment></comment>


The Real Reason to Wear a Mask - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/dont-wear-mask-yourself/610336/ <comment><USER2> "Models show that if 80 percent of people wear masks that are 60 percent effective, easily achievable with cloth, we can get to an effective R0 of less than one."

Sounds too good to be true, but it illustrates an important point. We are _not_ trying to prevent all spread of this virus, we're only trying to reduce the rate of transmission to manageable levels. The masks don't need to be perfect, or even close to it, as long as they help bring that transmission rate down. The more we can utilize low impact strategies like mask-wearing and hand-washing, the less we need to rely on more extreme measures.</comment>


Ask HN: Question on applying to Google/Facebook - <AUTHOR> Hi HN, I am applying to Google and Facebook. I work in the bay area for one the well known tech company.
Problem is that, I have never received interest from google or Facebook in he the past.
I applied to Facebook last weekend and I even didn't receive any confirmation email as well. Is this common ?  How do I get my resume in front of hiring manager at least ?
I don't mean to be rude or imply anything , but it seems that unless you went to top Ivy League school there is no way these Google/Facebook is willing to consider you.
I have an engineering degree from India and a few certifications from reputed universities in US, but I don't have masters degree due to cost reason. I code everyday and have taught myself quite a lot as opposed to attending grad school. I am trying for analytics position as opposed to SWE position.
Kindly suggest if there is anything I should put on my resume or change it such a way that at least I get interview opportunity. <comment><USER2> I am also interested in knowing. Anyone working at Goog/FB can comment ?</comment>


Show HN: Android app that allows you to follow a Facebook page without liking it - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ionicframework.followfbpages779824 <comment><AUTHOR> I made an app which allows you to follow facebook pages without actually liking those pages in facebook. This app will allow you to `follow` various facebook pages and this app will have a `wall` where you will have a PICTURES FEED of the facebook pages that you are following. Will you be interested in trying out this app?

If you do, please share your feedback. Thanks for your time.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ionicframe...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ionicframework.followfbpages779824)

<comment><USER2> Congratulations on launching.</comment></comment>


Show HN: GitHub Reviews – Reviews for Popular GitHub Repositories - <AUTHOR> https://githubreviews.com/?ref=hn <comment><AUTHOR> Hello Hacker News, I am Patrick, creator of GitHub Reviews. Thanks for stopping by!

I built this web application that lets people review popular GitHub repositories. The site allows users to:

* Determine quality by reading reviews and viewing aggregate ratings

* Discover related projects that are linked to each review

* Share their thoughts about a package with the rest of the community

* Improve repositories that they own by listening to their users

Currently on stackoverflow, questions in this vein are closed because answers would be too subjective. This usually happens despite strong interest from users.

Here are some reviews that I wrote: [https://githubreviews.com/plurch](https://githubreviews.com/plurch)

Any feedback or suggestions are welcome!

</comment><comment><USER2> So first off, I like this. I actually quite like the design as well. I absolutely agree that a "latest reviews" or something would be great. The first thing I want to do is at least see a single review, just to see what one looks like.

Probably a bit late for you to change since you have your domain name, but the name kind of suggests _code_ reviews. But I don't think you're really aiming for code reviews correct? You're aiming for a kind of package reputation?

A related project shown here as well: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11481459](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11481459)

There I wrote a comment about how package reputation systems have the slight problem about what to do when a package is updated. A review may then be out- of-date, but you cannot just delete old reviews since they may still be quite appropriate. So it isn't an easily solved problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I will add a "latest reviews" list to the homepage ASAP - some others have suggested this also.

Correct, we are not aiming for code reviews but for package quality/reputation. Hopefully the descriptions on the homepage are clear and this does not confuse too many people.

Regarding the problem of outdated reviews - I have a specific field where the reviewer can put the current version that they are reviewing (example: [https://goo.gl/rWMHgB](https://goo.gl/rWMHgB) shows version 4.8.2). Reviewers can also easily update their existing reviews and bump this version as necessary. We also show the date that the review was last updated.

<comment><USER2> I like the easy way of bumping the version attached to review. That mitigates it to some extent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like the idea, but you have to work on the Design. I would not try to advertise it in that moment. Also create something that shows recent/popular reviews. At the moment i get the feeling that nothing is going on on your site.

A Question based on your comment, how do i know as package maintainer that there is your site with potential reviews on my package?

<comment><AUTHOR> Which aspects of the design do you think need improvement?

I agree that there are not many reviews since I have just launched, but I need people to be aware of the site's existence so that they can contribute.

Currently there isn't any notification system in place for package maintainers, but that would be a nice feature to add.

<comment><USER3> Its not about the amount of views but showing that something is going on. Basically i have to find a project you commented on randomly to know there is any review at all. I would expect some "Latest reviews" on the startsite or something.

About the design it is mostly the colors that create a strange look, but also the "purse" bootstrap elements. There is no uniqueness to that. The colors look a bit like choosen randomly, there is no general theme for them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see your point. A list that shows recent reviews on the homepage would be helpful.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your thoughts on licensed Software Engineers? - <AUTHOR>

I came across this article from 2012 that talks about some states in the US now offering a licensure examination for Software Engineering. The idea is to bring standards to the software field similar to the ones that exist for other branches of engineering.
The comments section is particularly negative to this idea. It seems like most of the people commenting are established software developers that are reluctant to this change.
Reading the article, I begin to agree that licensure may be a good idea. The term "Software Engineering" has such a wide span that some delineation could be a good thing. As software continues to eat the world what will delineate the differences between a CRUD web application developer and someone qualified to write code for pacemakers, satellites, missiles, etc?
How is this sort of thing handled in countries other than the US?
Is licensure a good or bad idea? I'd like to hear the communities' thoughts.
Link: http://theinstitute.ieee.org/career-and-education/career-guidance/licensing-software-engineers-is-in-the-works <comment><USER2> I think our environment is changing too quickly for a licensing/certification program to keep up. Unless you broaden the scope of such a license so that it applies regardless of the technology used.

</comment><comment><USER3> How many Ph.D's have you met who can't write software? If years of study is not a good measuring stick, I don't see how a "software engineer" certification will help.

I see it as red tape. For serious work you have serious interviews. It doesn't involve looking at their certs and degrees.

It comes down money. There will be a fee paid for the exam. Will other organizations be able to offer certification or will IEEE have a monopoly?

</comment><comment><USER4> I am an established developer, and licensing would not hurt me at all: I work for a big company, I have a CS degree, and years of experience. I object to licensing because it would destroy the most appealing aspects of our industry. Right now, if you've got a great idea you can drop out of college and bootstrap a company that changes people's lives and makes you a billionaire. That is _fucking awesome_. Licensing would kill that _completely_.</comment>


Our Pre-Y Combinator Interview Experience, Day 1 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.grubwith.us/our-pre-y-combinator-interview-experience-day

<comment><USER2> Thanks for coming by the office -- it was cool to hear how the business is going.

</comment><comment><USER3> Grubwithus is a fine seed of an idea, but fact of the matter is simply that people don't really enjoy eating with strangers. Also have a non-strangers use-case, as that's the most common way people eat together. Also, facebook login gave some error.

On an unrelated note, why does posterous not do something about the view count display issue? It has been irritating me for some weeks now. The viewcount is constantly showing as "Viewed 154times" lacking a gap between the digit and the text. Are they too busy to notice this? Perhaps they are getting acquired and stuck doing a lot of business stuff/travelling around and have little time for technical stuff?

<comment><AUTHOR> Max, give it a try and you'll see that it's actually a ton of fun =) The people that go to the meals are inherently social, and always have interesting things to say. In Chicago, a bunch of people come that just moved to the city, are traveling for business, are tired of meeting people at bars, or just are older now and their social circle has decreased.

<comment><USER3> Well, I guess it needs the right kind of person to appreciate this. I've never been that kind of person to eat with random people, so I guess it would be pretty difficult for me to really get it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What do people see as the pros and cons of publicly discussing that you have a YC interview?

If they get rejected, now every investor they talk to, etc. knows for a fact that they got rejected from YC. That may not be a situation they'd be happy with.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is something we thought about, but hey, we're already live and tons of great companies get rejected. Might as well risk it and get some exposure!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Off-topic technical comment: the sign up page at grubwith.us gets a mixed content warning. It seems like you guys are hitting jquery from <http://ajax.googleapis.com>.

</comment><comment><USER6> Any meals planned for Saturday/Sunday?

<comment><USER7> I had a brief e-mail chat with Eddy about that and it didn't sound to promising, though largely because at the time all of the existing meals were very under-subscribed.

If anyone wants to try and set something up outside of grubwithus for Saturday night, myself and my two co-founders are probably up for it. Comment here or drop me an e-mail at my HN username at zettabytestorage.com (my previous product).</comment></comment>


Card: A better credit card form in one line of code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jessepollak/card

<comment><USER2> Already discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7847440](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7847440)</comment>


Facebook's community standards censorship has far-reaching consequences - <AUTHOR> https://watilo.com/facebooks-community-standards-censorship-has-far-reaching-consequences <comment><USER2> To me, this just shows why it's important to build communication channels that you own (e.g. podcast, mailing list, etc) if you want to have unimpeded access to your audience. Today it's a censorship thing, tomorrow it'll be somebody deciding to erect a toll booth between you and your followers. Social platforms should just be the cherry on top of your foundational communications strategy.

<comment><USER3> How can you own any online communication channel? Your domain registrar could decide your domain is abusive and terminate it. Your hosting platform could decide it doesn't like the politics of your site / business / whatever and refuse to host it. Your advertising provider could decide it doesn't like your ad content and refuse to serve it. Your billboard vendor could decide to cave to local government if there are complaints about your billboard. The local police could push you out of a public space where you try to hand out flyers. Your landlord could not allow you to renew your lease because they privately don't like your politics and just invent any outwardly permissible fake reason for it.

We live in a world where you're not allowed to exist unless you (publicly profess to) believe what one of two prevailing political parties dictates is allowable, yet at the same time we pretend like you do have free speech but just have to live with social consequences of it.

<comment><USER4> An unfortunate consequence of the private-only internet. If you want to send out newsletters about how right-handed people are scum and the cause of all earth's problems the postal service isn't allowed to stop you. If you want to have conference calls about how much you and your friends hate right-handed people the phone company has to let you. It's part of the social and legal contract that neutral carriers are not responsible for user-generated content. The internet doesn't have that. Because YouTube has the legal ability to censor your "Righties are Wrongies" videos the public demands that they do so, and as non-neutral private companies they will do whatever makes them the most profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How does not one of their well paid engineers flag that this will obviously happen when implementing these features?

<comment><USER6> engineers implement what they are told to do, and decisions are made in upper management level. very likely this direction came from very high levels and then this implementation is trickled down to relevant departments / developers.

<comment><USER5> I can see this happening. This is one of the biggest reasons I think product development needs to be close to the engineers. They understand it and understand the implications more than someone abstracted away from it. In an ideal world the engineers would also _care_ for the product too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> All of this content control will be an interesting social experiment. I would like to see a clear hypothesis though, and ways we can judge whether this is a success or failure.

(I'm using the term "content control" to mean something that kind of feels like censorship but not done with laws.)

<comment><USER8> Even if the made a nice clear hypothesis, they won't have a control group. So the hypothesis would be meaningless.

Real life rarely gives you as much control as you'd like. You can't simply opt out of making decisions; even choosing not to do anything is a decision. You take your best guess based on your best interpretation of what knowledge you've managed to accumulate, but many of the most important decisions you make will always be based on insufficient information. That's true at a personal level as well as the social level.

<comment><USER7> I agree that it couldn't be a rigorous double-blind.

But the point is to make some kind of prediction about the results a policy will have, so that you can later reflect on what actually does happen.

<comment><USER9> Hopefully this is deep enough in a thread not to be in the way, but I noticed in some other threads that you were getting pushback on your username. Could you possibly clarify, and perhaps add something to your profile, whether that is "My name is really Jeff Davis" or "I'm a proud Southerner" or whatever the reason might actually be?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bets on what the content was that got foliohd banned?

<comment><USER11> I would recheck logs and content hosted on the website and its subdomains

Maybe one of the other users has something really out there being shared in another subdomain

(Or it might not be a customer - but someone who found a vulnerability and is hosting questionable content unbeknownst to him)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> His portfolio website arguably competes with Facebook, where artists sometimes have pages for their work. I doubt this case is a deliberate attempt to strangle a competitor in the crib (although I'm sure this does happen), but if Facebook were actually scared of anti-trust enforcement I think their whole blocking process would be a little less draconian.

</comment><comment><USER13> If Hillary had won none of this would have been a problem. No claims of "election interference", no one would have accused Facebook of being "used to manipulate the voters". Life would have been happy for Facebook, Twitter and other entities.

</comment><comment><USER14> It seems to me that this guy is unaware of the hundreds of other people who get blocked on Facebook platforms daily for years now. Otherwise he'd have already drawn the conclusion to leave all those platforms instead of begging Facebook to care. Because they obviously don't.

</comment><comment><USER15> Literally anything Facebook does will have far reaching consequences. Edit: What I mean to say is that maybe we could choose a better title.

<comment><USER16> That's why it should do as little as possible.

<comment><USER17> the whole premise of Facebook is to do things for you, doing as little as possible would make cease to be Facebook

<comment><USER18> > _the whole premise of Facebook is to do things for you_

Disagree; it's to hoover up your personal information to use for advertising.

> _make cease to be_

Sounds like a great idea!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dutch men confirmed as world's tallest - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36888541 <comment><USER3> As a tall Dutch man who has been dragged into this conversation a lot, it is interesting to note that only 150 years ago, the Dutch were the shortest nationality in Europe. To me this means that nutrition has a massive effect on growth. In fact, regular food in Dutch supermarkets is supposedly the most cost-effective fresh food on the planet, ie quality/freshness vs price. I wouldnt be surprised if the growth in relative length of the Dutch correlated with the increased centralization of commerce through the port of Rotterdam (and thus provide access to lots of fresh produce quickly, compared to countries "down the rivers".

<comment><USER4> Personally, I find the Dutch diet to be pretty unadventurous and poor. Sandwiches predominate, with not a lot of variety in cooking. This may well be irrelevant to the OP; nothing but cheese sandwiches and sour buttermilk may well be the perfect diet for growing tall.

As for the Rotterdam argument, I suspect fresh food would have to be flown in rather than shipped, which takes weeks.

<comment><USER5> Dutch food is the worst. The Dutch think of eating as a chore. When was the last time you went out for Dutch food? There's a reason the answer is never.

<comment><USER6> How many countries the size of the Netherlands do have a typical cuisine that's recognized around the world?

<comment><USER4> Jamaican, Greek, Lebanese, hell even Belgian (mussels and frites!)

Size is no excuse.

<comment><USER6> So just 4? My point is there are not many countries that have highly recognizable cuisines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "Tall people tend to have a longer life expectancy, with a reduced risk of > heart disease. On the other hand, there is some evidence that they are at > greater risk of certain cancers, such as colorectal, postmenopausal breast > and ovarian cancers."

This is actually false. When controlled for childhood nutrition, shorter people have much higher life expectancies Source: [http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/07/height_and_longevity_the_research_is_clear_being_tall_is_hazardous_to_your.html) (among other sources)

<comment><USER8> That article is all over the place. Centenarians in Japan are 4 inches shorter than 75-year-olds? No mention of controlling for diet during upbringing, nor that a human shrinks as they age. The taller half of Europe has fewer centenarians per capita than the shorter half? No mention of climate, which is more troublesome to the elderly in northern Europe. Scandanvians have more heart disease than Iberians? No mention of dietary control. Sardinian soldiers who reach age 70 live a little longer if short? What about if they don't reach age 70? What if more short Sardinian soldiers die in their 60s?

There isn't much in the way of apples-to-apples comparison in that article.

<comment><USER9> Here is a list of studies from the nih with the same conclusion:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071721/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071721/)

The research is clear - controlled for other factors, shorter people live longer.

<comment><USER10> To those that have this cited to them regularly (and always by short people) - the correct response is "yeah, but you're living longer whilst short"

<comment><USER11> I may be short, but at least I can fully extend my legs on economy flights.

Beat that, tall person.

<comment><USER12> I'm 6'8 and my girlfriend is 5'2\. Usually I find our arguments to be the opposite way round in that "you have it better", e.g. My girlfriend needs a stool to reach the top shelf of the cupboards, but I have to time my steps as to not hit my head on door frames.

I think the worst one was learning to drive and then the many frustrating trips trying to find a car I could fit in.

<comment><USER13> Once you can reach that tall cupboard the returns start diminishing fast. Pros/Cons are very lifestyle dependent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have a fun bit of anecdata. My wife and I are not Dutch but our son was born in Amsterdam. He was over 6' (183cm) when he was 13 and is now about 6'5 at 17 years old. I never reached 6' myself, and only a few cousins/uncles have.

One thing the Dutch do is give doses of vitamins particularly D to all children for the first few years.

It's vital for the darker skinned citizens (Moroccans/Algerians) but probably pointless for the 'average' white Dutch person.

My standard joke to Dutchies is that they grow tall to compensate for the fact that much of the Netherlands is lower than sea level.

<comment><USER15> Hey there I'm Algerian. I find height to be an interesting topic in Algeria because a lot of people grew much taller after france left algeria, so i think environment and nutrition are big factors. My mom, her sister, and her brother were all born in the early 50s during the war and french rule and they were all relatively short. 5'0 5'2 and 5'7 for my uncle, while her other two siblings a sister and brother who were born after the war were much taller. My aunt was 5'6 and my uncle 6'0, and now his son is 6'5.

<comment><USER16> I think people grew taller generally after the 60s ? Richer nutrition globally certainly, lots of meat (also leading to earlier puberty I seem to remember) ?

<comment><USER17> Earlier puberty normally results in a shorter adult - since kids tend to grow slowly before puberty and stop once it finishes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I always find it funny that being tall is seen as positive. There is actually a lot to say for being short. Cars and houses could be smaller, we'd need less food. Is there really anything a 4 foot person can't do as opposed to a 6 foot person? We just need a frame to carry our brains around. Of course there is some tail-end of the distribution stuff like professional basketball and sumo wrestling. And there is the fact that we didn't optimize the world for small people. But I think there is good case for smaller people.

<comment><USER19> The article is discussing taller populations, not individuals. Within populations being tall tends to be a proxy metric for general prosperity, so of course it's a positive.

Aside from that there seem to be intrinsic advantages to being tall. Taller people have bigger bodyparts, including bigger brains, and there's a correlation between larger craniums and higher intelligence[1].

This doesn't seem to be a very thoroughly studied subject though, but it really should be. If there's anything we could be doing to increase the average intelligence of human species that's going to pay dividends down the road.

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

<comment><USER18> "Within populations being tall tends to be a proxy metric for general prosperity"

Which is something I object to. In the past obesity and skin color were also linked to propserity. In some countries they still are. We shouldn't accept such nonsense.

<comment><USER19> You object to consistently having plentiful nutrition from infancy on the scale of nations over large time spans being strongly linked to prosperity? That's essentially what the tall = positive statement is about.

Few things are as well established as strong correlations for prosperity. You might as well say "I reject reality and substitute my own".

<comment><USER18> I do reject your concept of realitiy and I do think everybody is substituting their own.

Other than that I think being tall is great, but being small is better. Our nutrition has improved quite a lot through the years. And I hope it will continue to do so. I say let's start with cutting all growth hormones from our meat and milk and see where that brings us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder how much the negatives of being short are caused by lower self esteem due to simply what people say and think about heights.

I'm one of the shortest people in the country with the tallest people in the world, the Netherlands. My height is 164 cm (aside: why do people tend to give their heights in imperial units? Does anyone get that?). I actually never had a problem with my height or felt bad about it when I was younger. I felt bad about plenty of other things about myself. I remember in elementary school a medical inspection where the inspector told me I'll always be short, and asked me what I thought of it, as if I'd be depressed about it. I didn't get her at all. But whenever there's discussion about it online, it's things like people saying women prefer taller men, or people who are 10 cm taller than me saying they hate being short, and people like that inspection woman that do trigger the insecurity part of my brain.

I think it's completely irrational though. As other people have posted, I think the link between health, intelligence and height is one of correlation instead of causation. And I know women's preferences are often much more diverse and different than what people tend to say and think. But still it triggers that insecurity. And I know that can really be a bad thing in itself. Maybe that's the real "shortness" problem people tend to have?

<comment><USER21> It's all relative. As the paper shows, 164cm is average male height in some countries. The average person is only a plane ride away from being either a short or tall person. Unless they are Dutch.

Women certainly don't want to date men who are shorter than they are. So it _is_ a definite inconvenience to be shorter than the average woman in your own country.

<comment><USER22> Yup.

Just sit at a cafe and note every couple you see and count how many women are taller than their male counterpart. I'd be willing to bet you that if I did in my area, I'd find 0. In fact, in all my years of living and traveling I've only seen ONE couple that had a short guy (less than five foot six) with a tall woman (six foot tall+).

Or look at dating profiles on match.com and see what women want in terms of eligible heights. You're extremely likely to find women want guys who are taller than they are. In fact, it's not uncommon for a short women to want at minimum guys who are close to a foot taller than they are.

And then look at movies and show and see how often couples have the women taller than the man. It's not often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My understanding is that both the tallest and the shortest men are in Africa, and this is due to that continents having the highest genetic diversity - <USER2> a small subset of the human genes left Africa.

<comment><USER24> I don't think it matters much the "small subset of human genes left Africa". More crucial is that the African landscape is quite varied and not too harsh. Almost everywhere south of the Sahara a small tribe could eke out a living. And yet, the environment wasn't too friendly to readily encourage population growth that lead to civilisation(s).

Such forces lead to genetic drift (and therefore variation) and also makes tribal formations unavoidable. The phenotype(s) of these tribes are then the embodiment of that genetic drift. When it comes to height, you end up with the Pygmy tribes in the Congo basin and the Dinka along the Nile basin.

<comment><USER25> > I don't think it matters much the "small subset of human genes left Africa".

That is exactly wrong. Bottlenecking _is_ the reason why diversity outside of africa is dramatically lower than the within the continent.

[http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/jou...](http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1003309)

"The pattern of genomic variation in contemporary southern African populations thus resulted from unions between the most diverse genomes found within Africa to the least differentiated as represented by populations impacted by a severe founder effect (bottleneck) associated with the out-of-Africa dispersal"

<comment><USER24> Given time, a hash enough environment is going to select for phenotypes despite the quality of the genetic variation. That has to happen or the group dies off [1]. That is the point of the phase "I don't think it matters much". I expect a refutation of that statement to be along the lines of, "here is information that shows that the difference in genetic variation between the in Africa and outside of Africa peoples is so big (or the latter have very low variation) that there are marked differences in adaptability to different environments".

[1] The reason for extinction may well be very low genetic variation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There is an endless supply of vitamin D in the sunny Italy or Spain. I don't think that vitamin suplements have a real effect here.

Using the same reasoning, we could find a link between legally smoking Cannabis and being taller.

</comment><comment><USER27> I guess upon reading this, there will be a lot of tall women moving to the Netherlands, making the difference even bigger.

<comment> guard-of-terra In my anecdotal experience (which I nevertheless tend to value more than "obvious" trivia everybody carries around),

Tall women don't prefer taller men.

Well, maybe they do in principle, but it doesn't seem to affect their choice at the end of day. Most of really tall women usually go with average height men.

<comment><USER27> What women settle for may not be what they prefer.

Hence perhaps you should limit your study to really attractive women.

<comment> guard-of-terra I don't care terribly much what they prefer.

Much more interesting question is what they settle on. That's what determines selection.

<comment><USER27> Perhaps you should re-read this subthread from the top :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder what the results would look like aggregated by ethnic group rather than nationality. Some African groups (such as the Maasai and Dinka) are known for having really tall people, but they don't have countries of their own, so they disappear when averaged with their shorter countrymen.

</comment><comment><USER29> Dutch are ridiculous, as a 6'3" man I'm barely above average when visiting Amsterdam

</comment><comment><USER30> dutch parents stuff milk down the throats of their children. the kids dont like it as the stuff often tastes bad but they keep doing it anyway. 'melk is goed voor elk' (milk is good for everyone) and 'joris driepinter' (joris drinkes three glasses a day) are common folklore here. You get milk with your breakfast and again at school. we don't have school provided lunch in primary school, but we did have school provided milk. I suppose it is good for one thing though: I'm like 6'2 ish and sometimes i actually feel a bit short.

<comment><USER6>
      "Stuff milk down the throats of their children"

You must have had some bad parents. It's true that milk is often served for breakfast, but so are tea and orange juice.

      "we did have school provided milk"

Shows your age. That's a seventies thing.

<comment><USER31>
        >> "we did have school provided milk"
        >
        > Shows your age. That's a seventies thing.

Not only. I was in school in the Netherlands in the early nineties, and had "schoolmelk".

<comment><USER32> I think practically everywhere in Europe did that in the '80s and '90s. We'd get milk and yoghurt in primary school in Ireland back then. Don't know if the practice continued past '95, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I am a just above average Dutch man, but when I lived in the US I felt like a giant, it was interesting.

</comment><comment><USER34> And yet, they cannot get together 5 of them who know how to play basket.

Why the country with the tallest men (and exceptionally good sport equipment all over the country) does not have a good basketball team?

<comment><USER35> The Dutch Basketball league (including amateur of all ages) has about 40,000 players. It just isn't popular.

<comment><USER34> But it is quite popular in almost every other European country and the conditions here look perfect to me: tall people, good installations, a weather that usually favors indoor sports, a very active population willing to practice any sport... I see people following the NBA, I see sport shops where basketball equipment is no less present than in any other country, I see baskets in schools and high schools like everywhere. And I have even seen quite some people playing. Certainly more than playing volleyball, and the Dutch volleyball team is a very good one.

Of course football is the big thing here, but other countries like Spain or Italy where football is huge also have top basketball teams.

Thank you for the number of players data, but I still wonder what are the reasons that basketball is not bigger in the NL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm curious why Eastern European countries make up a majority of this top 10 list both for men and women. Is there something uniquely different about their diets?

<comment> guard-of-terra On Balkans they eat a lot of meat. They're kings of meat. Mostly in grilled form. Was awesome.

Serbian women are also spectacularly beautiful. While men are mostly "meh" (can't appraise them much, tho)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Ik ben een lang nederlander</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to learn SQL? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> What have you done before? Which documentation have you read so far? Which database engine are you dealing with?</comment>


23% of Subscribers Would Drop If Netflix Had Ads - <AUTHOR> https://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/23-of-subscribers-would-drop-if-netflix-had-ads <comment><USER2> Only 23%? That's disappointing. Adding commercials on top of their shrinking library and recent price hike would amount to spitting in the face of subscribers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would be very surprised if the actual attrition rate was anything close to that high.

People are likley to overstate how they would react, even measuring how poeple say they will react is incredibly difficult - depends on wording of the question, the context, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> No they will not. Netflix might do a boiling frog thingy, but pressure over quarters for rev growth will be their doom

</comment><comment><USER5> I think it's more like 23% would drop if there was a cheap competing service that had all Disney content on it.</comment>


This is what most likely happened to Mt. Gox - <AUTHOR> http://chrispacia.wordpress.com/2014/02/28/this-is-what-most-likely-happened-to-mtgox/

<comment><USER2> Fascinating. Basically the theory here is that "cold" storage, being physical and therefore within reach of governments, was more risky than "hot" storage. Talk about misjudging a threat model.

But then again, which one of us really designs their security systems with the men-with-guns scenario in mind?

</comment><comment><USER3> Just a side note: the author is a libertarian. I suspect he believed it was the government's fault from day one.

<comment><USER4> This is a perfect example of an ad hominem argument. No attempt to refute the evidence, just a reference to writer's (alleged) political beliefs.

This approach is common on Reddit, but I'm sad to see this type of argument on HN. Can we please do better than "this argument is wrong because of the writer's politics"? I'd hate to see that kind of argument become commonplace here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for pointing this out. I typed out a reply earlier to this effect, but deleted it. Fighting the same fight on Twitter.</comment></comment></comment>


U.S. publishers' revenue from ebooks roughly flat in 2013, but unit sales rose - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2014/06/26/the-size-of-the-u-s-ebook-market-in-2013-chart/

<comment><USER2> "but ebooks without ISBN numbers — which includes many self-published Kindle books — can't be tracked."

Many? More like "the overwhelming majority". None of the major ebook retailers require ISBNs, and given the bizarre pricing structure ($125 for 1, $295 for 10, $1,000 for 1,000) virtually nobody other than the big traditional publishers bothers with them.

Can you think of any other product whatsoever that retails for $125 in quantity one and $1 in quantity 1,000?

Any survey that excludes indy ebooks is essentially worthless. You can demonstrate this for yourself by going to one of the genre categories on Amazon (e.g., science fiction) and taking note of how many of the Top 10, Top 50, Top 100 are indy. Hint: lots of them.</comment>