The Twitter IPO: The numbers behind the hype - <AUTHOR> http://blog.timoshea.co.uk/twitter-ipo <comment><USER2> Twitter is a good middle term 5-10 year investment, but not a great long 10+ year investment. I have no idea if it is a good buy with the pricing they have.

Twitter reminds me of AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). Back when AOL was a big deal, AIM was how you chatted with people and the network effects of that were incredibly huge. Everybody, every brand, everything was on AOL. Then, the landscape shifted and high speed internet made AOL irrelevant. However, AIM was still around and a lot of people used it for years after they quit AOL.

Twitter's big risk isn't the next few years where it's still hugely popular and integrated with media everywhere, the risk is in 5+ years when something else comes along. Will twitter have the staying power of Yahoo, Google, and Facebook, or will it be more of a AOL/MySpace kind of thing?

I really have no idea, but I wouldn't bet on Twitter for more than 5 years.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's an interesting take, I think Twitter has long term growth potential but like the article says it's not Google and I don't think it ever will be. When Google filed for IPO it already had one of the biggest ad networks online, whereas Twitter is still growing.

Honestly I'm surprised Twitter has filed so early, I'd have thought next year would be more likely. If I was investing (and I'm not), I'd mark it as a risky venture, the business is clearly changing at the moment but it's still certainly growing in the metrics and it has an increasingly large amount of visibility in mainstream media. They do seem to have a strategy though.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm very skeptical of the twitter IPO for a few reasons: \- Monetizing their stream is not easy \- Few advertisers in their network are raving about ROIs \- My experiences as a platform developer have been better on other platforms \- Their support for their ecosystem is lukewarm at best \- The vulnerability to other mediums (insta, snap, etc etc) in the key markets for advertisers are also very risky \- Facebook I think is still going to crush them from an experience standpoint.

</comment><comment><USER5> I was expecting a more in depth look at the different markets these two play in, like how much was the search market worth and how much was Google capturing at IPO vs. twitter's relative numbers.

I think really the hard part in comparing these two companies are how users derive value from the two services.

</comment><comment><USER6> Can we please stop drawing conclusions about tech companies from their revenue figures? At this point it's a tired trope on hacker news that technology companies' valuations can't be explained by traditional equity analysis techniques.

Technology equities have highly variable price to earnings rations because of the expectation of greater growth in the future. This expectation means investors are effectively speculating about the future growth of the company, rather than making decisions based on classic quantitative methods like you would apply to an older company in a better understood industry. Applying these methods ignores this dynamic and also buys into the myth of the quantitative analysis that's so appealing to mathematically minded geeks like ourselves.

I submit that the only thing posts like these really accomplish is letting the author stroke his or her by using big words and apparently clever concepts, while simultaneously making it clear that they're misunderstanding the market.

<comment><USER2> If what you're trying to say is that the market prices tech companies irrationally and people should get over that, then yes I totally agree.

A smarter model for valuing tech companies would look at what their actual worth is, then separately factor in some kind of "bubble factor" or "irrational exuberance" factor that would price in the sentiment of people buying/selling the stock itself.

<comment><USER6> Again, you're missing the point and buying into the myth of the quantitative analyst. Irrationality and emotion are like a balloon: you squeeze on one end by implementing a bubble factor (however you defined that...) and the irrationality comes out on the other end.</comment></comment></comment>


DHH: Let's drop the unrealistic expectation of total transparency in open source - <AUTHOR> https://m.signalvnoise.com/expectations-of-total-transparency-in-open-source-can-easily-lead-to-burn-out-28dea1a07417#.ace460je8 <comment><USER2> Absolutely. The only thing that demanding total transparency gets you is hidden private groups. Private conversations will happen one way or another. From the outsider's perspective, the important thing is to make it explicit that there is that level of communication outside the public sphere when conveying decisions that were legitimately made by the core contributors that aren't directly observable from the outside. The goal is the reasoning and thoughts can be shared as much as possible, but when that isn't possible just acknowledging it is important.

At least that was my takeaway from my experience almost 20 years ago in a popular open source project.

</comment><comment><USER3> The point, or perhaps a corollary of the point here, is that famous people can't think in public because "every comment to every discussion is fair game for dissection, scrutiny, applause, or ridicule."

So you need to think privately so you're free to make mistakes, think poorly sometimes, be creative or whatever.

<comment><USER4> Realistically, a HUGE number of "successful" people do this (out of necessity or otherwise). Similarly, if you're in a leadership position you need to adopt a similar mentality after a time.</comment></comment>


Why I gave up on being a Mobile Developer - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/9-reasons-why-i-gave-up-on-being-a-mobile-developer-795f5fb37c1e <comment><USER2> Those technical problems can be overcome. It is no fun, a waste of time and frustrating. The real shitshow starts when your app is in the play store and you try to find users. Or when Google makes some changes that completely invalidate your app idea or force you to change your complete app.

</comment><comment><USER3> I just had the maintenance of an Android app dumped in my lap, and I'm dreading it. I have a decent amount of experience with iOS development and have been pretty impressed.

But everyone characterizes Android as a shítshow. As a consumer, Android's profound problems are evident from the fact that millions of devices are orphaned soon after release, because users must wait for every telco to dribble out a special version of the OS for every device, one at a time.

WTF? This is a 21st-century OS?

</comment><comment><USER4> Title is incorrect should be: "Why I gave up on being an Android developer"

The iOS development ecosystem is much more pleasurable to work in. I've had almost a decade of experience building BOTH native iOS and Android apps and the issues OP mentioned are all workable.

Mobile is here to stay :) and will be for the foreseeable long term, most of internet and web traffic is now routed through mobile devices, and building native experiences will always trump a web based one on mobile.

<comment><USER5> Especially with SwiftUI bringing reactive UI principles to native code ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > If I absolutely had to create a mobile app, I would still choose Flutter, > even if I only targeted Android. Working with the Android SDK is out of the > question for me.

This is the same conclusion and advice I give with the caveat that you don't need a specific capabilities that are not yet available in Flutter/Dart. e.g. video recording/playback is/was one such lacking area.</comment>


The Trent Affair: When the Union and Great Britain Nearly Went to War - <AUTHOR> http://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/civil-war/the-trent-affair-when-the-union-and-great-britain-nearly-went-to-war/ <comment><USER2> It acts like the British were innocent in the civil war. They weren't. They were actively arming and financing the south because they stood to benefit from internal strife in the US, even using their scottish rite southern jurisdiction freemasonic web to help support the KKK (bet you didn't know that one). Palmerston actively engaged in oligarchical subterfuge against the US, and besides the US angle was one of the primary actors behind the 1850 onwards expansion of the British empire worldwide (which they later, for pr purposes, changed _in name only_ to the commonwealth). As part of this was consolidation and removal of what Palmerston called the "arbitrary powers", such as Austria and Russia into that empire, largely through false "national liberation" policy (sound familiar?).

To act as if it was simply the Trent affair that was a main potential instigator of war between the US and Britain is to be extremely myopic about the bigger picture at play. A key forgotten piece of history in this saga is that the Russian tsar was also under threat by the British because they came to him to join them against the US and he refused and then sent two fleets of ships, one to NY and one to SF with sealed orders to attack anyone who attacked the US (in 1863), because the British were prepping for the post civil war collapse invasion, and they even had proxy-troops amassed on the Mexican/Canadian borders! For do not forget under Palmerston, England supports all revolutions, except her own. I also theorize this is why they financed the bolsheviks and post-Bakunin anarchists and assassinated the Tsars sons family later, in revenge for foiling their plans, besides the added step of consolidation/removal of another rival monarchy, as they were doing across Europe.

There is also evidence the the assassination of Lincoln wasn't just a lone nut, but had British backing. (Funnily enough, many US presidential assassinations match this pattern).

The death throes of these losses by the British are the setup for the following world wars, which were engineered largely by Edward the 7th.

If the British had attacked the US during this time using the Trent affair as the excuse, they likely would have created a US-Russia-Prussia coalition that probably would have won, essentially having WW1 in the 1860s instead.

This style of British subterfuge continues to this day.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50_iRIcxsz0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50_iRIcxsz0)

<comment><USER3> Sounds like nut job fantasy's of perfidious albion - why would the UK support the south who competed with the UK as a producer of cotton.

<comment><USER4> So that the UK could eventually conquer the United States and seize all cotton production as per the original British conquest and institution of the colonies.

The rest of what the above poster speaks is true. If you are unsure, you need to examine history more carefully before you think yourself a fit judge of "nut jobs".

<comment><USER3> Why would you want to conquer another country when you had vast resources already available in India.

Though if the anti catholic obsession of the monarchy had been replaced by one to recover the colonies 1812 would have been the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I need to resubscribe to this magazine; when I was a kid, I got it for Christmas from one of my uncles, and whenever it would come in, I'd read the thing cover to cover. Somewhere I've still got that stack of WWII and Civil War magazines, I hope - they tended towards in-depth treatments of individual engagements or units, monographs and first-hand accounts that are hard to turn up elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER6> I doubt either side would have been stupid enough to let it escalate because it was clear to everyone that the North was going to win from day 1 (including General Lee himself) and the Union knew that a war with THE naval superpower of the day wasn't a good idea.

<comment><USER7> The south didn't have to "win" they just had to not lose before the Union got tired of the war.

If you want to send an army into another country without local support you need a massive manpower and material advantage. After you account for that the two sides look more equal.

If Gettysburg had been a southern victory things could have turned out very differently.

<comment><USER8> > If you want to send an army into another country without local support you > need a massive manpower and material advantage. After you account for that > the two sides look more equal.

Or you simply need to be willing to sack and burn the opponent until they starve.

In addition, the slaves, who outnumbered free southerners by quite a bit, were not necessarily unwilling to cooperate with the Union soldiers. That's very different from trying to pacify an area that will fight to last man.</comment></comment></comment>


Test First CoffeeScript Development in the Browser [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFT0Lk6iz1c

<comment><USER2> A lot of the problems I saw at the most recent GDC seemed to stem from a lack of test adoption by game makers.

It's encouraging to see a game development platform supporting and encouraging tests right off the bat.</comment>


Relativity explains fundamental properties of gold - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2015-10-einstein-theory-relativity-fundamental-properties.html <comment><USER2> Not clear what "fundamental properties" they mean. Mass? Price? Sounds like color, but there's no explanation for that either. Original article is behind paywall.

<comment><USER3> [https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/72368/why-are- mo...](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/72368/why-are-most-metals- gray-silver/72412#72412)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your favorite idea pitches? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking to sharpen my pitching skills, mostly by studying people who have been there, done that. Who does the community think has the best pitching method? Single best pitch?<p>Any commentary, links to videos/articles, and general information about the topic is greatly appreciated!<p>(If you want to know why...I'm planning on participating in the Entrepreneur Idol competition http://entidol.com/ and would like to set myself up for victory. 3 parts practice + 1 part knowledge = success) <comment><USER2> I suggest tuning into Presentation Zen on a regular basis. <http://www.presentationzen.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> For a role model/inspiration I would go rent a couple seasons of Entourage and try to mimic Ari.</comment>


Back-of-the-envelope estimates of next quarter's unemployment rate - <AUTHOR> https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2020/march/back-envelope-estimates-next-quarters-unemployment-rate <comment><USER3> BTW, the St. Louis Fed has one of the biggest blessings for your "I can't afford neither Bloomberg nor Refinitiv" amateur economist. The amount of time series and the basic ability to do pointwise arithmetic operations is great!

All series sorted by popularity: [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series)

I wish other central banks (in other countries) stepped up to this amazing level.

<comment><USER4> Seconded. I (think? don't remember) I did Fed Challenge back in the day, and the econ resources I trusted most was Bloomberg/Economics, CNBC/Economics, and FRED by far: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Fed_Challenge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Fed_Challenge)

<comment><USER5> I second that. When I did the College Fed Challenge, FRED was my team's go-to source, followed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and National Bureau of Economic Research. We had a little pipeline where we'd take their data and make nicer-looking charts in Excel that we could import into our slide deck. When I'm taking to laymen about economics, I still refer to FRED charts because they're so accessible and the number of series is enormous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's not enough pressure on politicians in both parties to ensure a solid and fast as possible recovery.

It could end up that members of mostly one party in the Senate end up blocking most of these bare minimum measures.

Look at what some European countries are doing as the minimum: [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/business/nordic-way- econo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/business/nordic-way-economic- rescue-virus.html)

Here are some (for the most part) good ideas that should be considered: [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/opinion/coronavirus- econo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/opinion/coronavirus-economy-saez- zucman.html)

<comment><USER7> America has given full unemployment plus extra money, plus free money. How is that different from privatizing payroll?

Why is an 'employment guarantee' any better than what is happening in most of America -- layoffs with an explicit promise to rehire once the business is allowed to operate? It's not like paying companies to keep people on payroll in jobs that are not producing economic value really reduces unemployment anymore than not testing for coronavirus makes it go away.

I don't know why americans are so afraid of 'mass unemployment'. Most businesses will survive this crisis, due to debt suspensions or new debt at a very low rate or via direct government aid (which the government has so far provided plentifully, and will likely do more). Businesses have promised to rehire. However, a business that cannot right now provide a job that has value to the business ought to lay off people and let the social safety net take care.

The articles make some good points regarding healthcare, but aside from that, it makes no good argument why unemployment + the unemployment insurance that workers have paid into for exactly this scenario is worse than paying businesses to keep people on payroll who wouldn't be there otherwise.

<comment><USER8> Employment guarantees may include benefits (FMLA/Healthcare), which you definitely will not have with unemployment. The American system of tying healthcare to employment is showing it's huge weakness right now - <USER2> Americans need healthcare the most, they lose it.

"Rehiring" can also be slow because it forces employers HR departments to screen candidates all over again. If employees stay on the payroll, they can all report back to work once the crisis has passed. Instead, businesses that survive have to spend their first weeks "hiring" back employees if they can, instead of making profits. This delay will hurt the recovery further.

<comment><USER7> Yes, I agree with healthcare. FMLA doesn't make sense. If you're unemployed, you don't need to ask for time off. Plus, this is paid leave.

> "Rehiring" can also be slow because it forces employers HR departments to > screen candidates all over again.

No it doesn't. Just call your old employees and give them a job back.

<comment><USER6> The POV that there will be some idealistic point in the future where companies call all of their employees back is absurd. There might be some chance of this happening, but it's not large. And the times we're wrong then we're very wrong.

This isn't going to be unpaused. The economy will be spun back up gradually for everyone's safety. People will likely still be getting sick. Some at-risk people may not be able to safely re-enter the workforce for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't think any of their models can accurately predict what will happen. We don't have any good prior examples to base the models on. I don't think the economy will recover, but I also don't think it is possible to guess how bad it will be.

I don't think there is any model that can predict pent up demand.

I know a lot of my friends who still have jobs are talking about going out every night when the quarantine lifts so they don't have to cook.

If a lot of people do that, we'll suddenly need a lot of waiters back. And then they'll have money.

Or maybe everyone will have learned that they love cooking at home and never go out again.

I don't think there is any way to tell. We don't have any good prior data.

All the previous models assumed unemployment claims and stock market drops when it was possible for everyone to work.

Right now there are a lot of jobs that are temporarily suspended skewing the numbers.

<comment><USER10> But will your friends get haircuts, manicures, massages, etc every day when the quarantine lifts? Pent up demand only helps certain industries, unfortunately. Imagine being a hair dresser with a stack of bills from the shutdown and no big boost to income after the quarantine lifts to help pay things off.

Rough times ahead for many, sadly.

<comment><USER9> > Imagine being a hair dresser with a stack of bills from the shutdown

Presumably all of those bill are owed to other businesses, who are run by people. People with empathy. People who realize that keep a good customer is better than losing them, even if it means cutting them a break.

I think people will surprise others with how this pain will spread through the entire supply chain so it does't kill any one business. I think all the businesses in the supply chain know that killing everyone at the end of the chain isn't a good idea.

<comment><USER11> This is a fundamental question we are being and will be forced to answer more directly:

Are we willing to trust our collective empathy or do we need the social contract to fill in the gaps for collective protection from this harm?

I believe many will benefit from empathy, but it will be disproportionate and many communities who will need it the most will not receive it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is happening to the US economy is completely unprecedented. The comparison I most hear is to WWII - but instead of pivoting to support sending people to war and supporting their needs, our economy is pivoting to sending them home.

But as near as I can tell, we only ever sent about 10% of the population to WWII. This is 3x the hit of WWII! (I get that we don't have to make guns and tanks for people, just feed and house them).

<comment><USER13> Instead of pivoting to support the needs of Americans, we're shoveling money into massive corporations. Obviously it's not the American labourer who needs help. No, it's the shareholders and execs who run big companies. I love this country!

<comment><USER14> This is truly insane, the most impacted people are the ones who are living paycheck to paycheck, and leading small businesses. Yet, the only thing the government cares about is SP500. This truly shows how corrupt the establishment is.

<comment><USER3> This is a common misconception. The Fed doesn't care about the S&P500 (the president does, though, judging by his tweets ...). You may be projecting because you care about it.

Fed cares about the credit market, not the stock market. It's amazing how many people don't even know that the credit market is much bigger than the stock market. Since these days everything is an ETF you can look up $LQD (investment grade corporate bonds) and $HYG (low grade/junk corporate bonds) to see "what's really going on". You can also look up spreads for each rating grade on FRED.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The most infuriating part of the shutdown is the disconnect I see between comments on Twitter, where the shutdown is basically a game because everyone has a WFH-capable tech job, and in real life, where I have family members suddenly unemployed, with wild uncertainty about whether they'll get their job back (in a month? two? three?). It's incredibly stressful, and not a fun joke.

Like, independent of whether you think the shutdown is the right risk / reward tradeoff, please at least think about the 70% of the workforce that cannot work from home, because they work in restaurants or physical service jobs. If you are still working (or at least pulling a paycheck), you're incredibly lucky -- please don't act like you have the only voice of moral authority about when and how this should end, and the calculus that goes into that tradeoff.

<comment><USER16> Thank you for stating what my mind couldn't quite put into words. I see lots of people with professional-class, WFH jobs being very sanctimonious about any suggestion that we should in any way take into account the financial impact when making the risk-reward decisions. Which, taken to its logical conclusion, would suggest that a worse-than-average flu season should also shut everything down, since tens of thousands of lives could be at stake. If this were somehow a pandemic which impacted the professional class more than the working class, I suspect we would see a very different moral calculus at work.

<comment><USER17> I agree with the grandparent that we aren't worried enough about the large percentage of people that can't work at home but your statement that "would suggest that a worse-than-average flu season" is not backed by any science. There are 12-60k deaths a year from the flu according to the CDC (last year is in the 24-60k range). There are 37k deaths from COVID right now and the number is still increasing at non-linear rates. This is /on-top/ of the flu deaths. So this isn't just "a slightly worse flu season".

<comment><USER15> I don't mean to suggest that this won't be worse than the flu when all is done, but you're comparing global COVID-19 deaths to US-only flu deaths (US COVID deaths are about 3,000 right now, not 37,000).

<comment><USER17> I misread the data. I assumed it was global, but it was US only data I was looking at.

<comment><USER18> For the record global flu deaths some years are about 600k.

There is a good chance the lockdowns are saving more lives due to the normal flu then covid.

[https://www.euromomo.eu/index.html](https://www.euromomo.eu/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Mostest Important caveat from the link:

This is not an official St. Louis Fed calculation. The post is titled "back- of-the-envelop estimate of unemployment", the data sources are from two blog posts, and it was written by a researcher on their blog. This is not an official document, and appears that it likely wasn't vetted.

<comment><USER20> If you believe the conclusion that 50% of small businesses don't have cash reserves for a month([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22719981](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22719981)), and ~50% of Americans with jobs work for small businesses, it's not far fetched to think that 25% of people will soon be unemployed. Add in the people working for larger firms, like travel and vacation related firms, and you can easily get to 30% unemployment.

<comment><USER21> Several businesses near me immediately announced on social media they were permanently closing for business, the moment the lockdown was announced. They must have been struggling prior to the lockdown and knew there would be no way to recover.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Most important caveat from the link:

> [T]hese calculations do not account for any potential effects of fiscal > measures, such as payroll support measures for small businesses

A $2 trillion stimulus very likely means that the actual figures are significantly less than what this model calculates.

<comment><USER23> In fairness the author also gave a massive error bar "between 10.5% and 40.6%." So whether or not the stimulus is sufficient to avert the worst depends on where we sit between "mild recession" and "social collapse."

<comment><USER24> 10.5% unemployment isn't a mild recession. It's a touch worse than 2008.

<comment><USER23> True, but I think there's more metrics to a recession than peak unemployment. It took years for unemployment to dip below 8% after 2008, but only time will tell what the recovery looks like here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> That would make it higher than the great depression, which peaked at 23%.

<comment><USER26> Which is why the "model" is 100% certified organic horseshit. If they want to tell me that a temporary pause in the roaring economy is worse than the largest systemic collapse to ever happen to it, I say "GTFO".

<comment><USER27> "Temporary pause" is an incredibly naive way to describe what's happening. Millions of people (and businesses) will miss their rent/mortgage payments that are due Wednesday. Some not-insignificant portion of those missed rent payments will result in more mortgage payments being missed. Many who've lost their jobs and rack up debt during this won't be able to find a job when the economy is able to be spun back up. It seems obvious that there's going to be terrible cascading effects.

<comment><USER26> And millions of people will go back to work in June. And millions of people and businesses will receive government support in the interim.

<comment><USER28> That's assuming:

* The correlated decline in productivity, the gaps in mortgage and rent payments, and so on do not result in our financial system breaking in surprising ways, like how a small increase in mortgage default rates did with synthetic collateralized debt obligations in 2007-2008. An increase in fixed rate mortgage defaults from 5% to 10% contributed significantly to the largest recession in nearly a century. I don't think anyone can say with certainty that nothing like this lurks in our financial system, this is like a bug in a program which requires dozens of different code paths to all enter into an invalid state simultaneously, and only _then_ do you see the result.

* That we can actually restore everything to normal by June with the development of a cheap and easy to administer vaccine, which seems extremely unlikely to materialize in only 2 months.

<comment><USER7> Nah. Most people are going to forgive debts in the interrim. It only makes sense.

> like how a small increase in mortgage default rates did with synthetic > collateralized debt obligations in 2007-2008.

What you fail to mention is that most mortgages in 07 and 08 were perfectly fine and you could find alternate home owners willing to actually pay. This is completely different. The government has shut down the economy. It's not like there are a lot of people you could sell a home too. Most debt collectors are going to let the debt go and not demand it, realising they cannot find any alternative.

> * That we can actually restore everything to normal by June with the > development of a cheap and easy to administer vaccine, which seems extremely > unlikely to materialize in only 2 months.

Unlikely that there is a vaccine, but we won't need it. The country has gone through much worse pandemics, and they typically do not cause great economic harm. In fact, they often lead to boom timse.

<comment><USER28> > Most people are going to forgive debts in the interrim

> Most debt collectors are going to let the debt go and not demand it,

I find it hard to believe you're familiar with debt collection in the United States!

> Unlikely that there is a vaccine, but we won't need it. The country has gone > through much worse pandemics,

If we're willing to just let lots of people die, then sure, we "won't need it".

The case fatality rate (CFR) depends on ventilator and ICU capacity. We'll have a better estimate for US case fatality rates due to the outbreak in New York soon, but so far it seems to be that even though deaths lag cases, deaths have been roughly 2% of confirmed cases for a few weeks. If that holds up as confirmed cases rise into the millions, that would put this on par with the 1918 pandemic. If it doesn't, New York will give us a better idea of the CFR in a modern American city's medical system.

<comment><USER7> > with the 1918 pandemic

which we got through without state-wide lockdowns.

<comment><USER28> "The government response - or lack thereof - to the 1918 pandemic was good, actually" wasn't a take I was expecting on this site, but perhaps I should have.

<comment><USER7> I didn't say it was good. I just said that -- after the flu was over -- it did not lead to sustained economic depression. The bounce back was phenomenal. The roaring 20s represented a level of wealth that has henceforth been unmatched.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can we get a title change? The actual title of the article is "Back-of-the- Envelope Estimates of Next Quarter's Unemployment Rate", which is emphatically not the St. Louis Fed estimating anything.

<comment><USER30> Well, it is on the St. Louis Fed's web site...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> From the caveat list:

 _many businesses may send workers home with pay instead of laying them off outright._

Others may get some other benefit, like the friend of a friend who gets health insurance but no pay through the beginning of June. Not sure how it impacts unemployment benefits. I think the hope is that this thing will cycle through, the economy will recover (like after 9/11) and people can be brought back to the same job.

</comment><comment><USER32> What is their track records for these estimates? Have they accurate in the past? My impression from GDP growth estimates is that everyone stays close to the average growth, but actual growth is apparently much more volatile in a random way. Similar with EPS estimates from stock analysts.

</comment><comment><USER33> "Views expressed are not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis or of the Federal Reserve System."

</comment><comment><USER34> Is there a breakdown of retail and travel-industry related jobs, versus other categories?

<comment><USER35> Yes. Consider, for example, any reason why Las Vegas should continue to exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> And yet stocks have rebounded 20% since Monday lows last week.

<comment><USER14> You're looking at SP500, which are big companies that are going to be fine.

<comment><USER37> All-cap indices (eg. VB) have seen similar rebounds, although they did rebound less than the large cap companies (SPY).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If it's raining you bring an umbrella, if it's hot you wear shorts, if there's a pandemic you wear a mask - everywhere all the time. They shouldn't of let people on airplanes, buses, buildings, etc.. without a mask. Don't have one? Here's some scissors cut up a tshirt, or use a scarf. It doesn't need to be N95 perfect. Just a barrier to keep you from touching your face, and to catch a good amount of spit flying out of your mouth every time you open it. Grocery stores, gas stations, offices that are still open, private social gathering, etc.. still no one is wearing a mask (in America at least) Asia was way ahead of us with their health culture on this one, we need to step it up. Unfortunately it's a message that really needs to come from the highest levels. The politicians, news casters, etc.. on TV need to be giving announcements with masks to get the point across.

<comment><USER39> > if there's a pandemic you wear a mask - everywhere all the time

I thought the expert advice from the WHO is to _not_ wear a mask?

> There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the > mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to > suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it > properly.

Do you know better than the WHO?

<comment><USER40> Yes, it's absolutely essential in these uncertain times that we do not allow ourselves to be led astray by our own best judgement or common sense, but instead rely upon the expert guidance of organizations such as the WHO.

[https://mobile.twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152](https://mobile.twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152)

<comment><USER39> Maybe that's what the data supported at the time?

Shouldn't we be going with data rather than 'common sense'?

<comment><USER41> Sometimes you have the luxury of multiple trustworthy parties having already each done a large sample size peer reviewed double blind study on just the question you want to know the answer to and have all come to the same conclusion.

Other times that hasn't happened yet and you still need to make a decision about what to do today, not after six months of further study.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


My First Aragon App: Voting Supercharged with DAOstack's Holographic Consensus - <AUTHOR> https://blog.aragon.one/first-aragon-app-holographic-consensus-part-1/ <comment><USER2> > If a proposal is boosted, the total voting token supply doesn't matter at > all, only the tokens involved in the vote are counted. That is, if merely > three tokens out of a total supply of 1000 were involved in the vote, and > two support the proposal—66% support—that's enough to approve the proposal! > So, stakers are not only betting on which proposals will eventually be > supported and signaling voters towards them, but they are actually > catalyzing the decision making process dramatically.

TLDR, a small amount of voters can basically hijack quorums by throwing tokens at the problem.

Also, what is with these "decentralized networks" which seem to have amazing amounts of money to throw at vaguely described problems, but can't seem to actually indicate where their money comes from or how they intend to profit? Aragon is yet another "we'll give you large sums of money if you use our platform" without clearly indicating the why or how of where the money comes from, and how they intend to profit.

<comment><USER3> They did an ICO if I'm not mistaken

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can anyone give simplified explanation for what "Holographic Consensus" means?

Or have a link to an easier to understand resource?

<comment><USER2> > Almost by definition a proper solution to this problem should allow for > decisions in a DAO to be made locally —i.e. with limited attention and > voting power, as long as these decisions are ensured to be in line with the > global opinion of the DAO. We've coined² this peculiar situation holographic > consensus, being reminiscent of a hologram where every little piece of the > picture actually contains the information of the entire image. In this > article I'm presenting the holographic consensus (HC) solution for scalable, > resilient and decentralized governance, describing its basics and how it is > enabled. In the next post of this series I'll continue with a more detailed > prescription of a HC protocol, and will discuss its scalability and > resilience properties.

[https://medium.com/daostack/holographic-consensus- part-1-116...](https://medium.com/daostack/holographic-consensus- part-1-116a73ba1e1c)

A "DAO" is a "decentralized autonomous organization". The term isn't defined further than that.

In plain english, if I understand this, the idea is for a voting algorithm that allows a random or semi-random subset of an organization (a DAO) to make decisions for the group as a whole, so that not every member has to vote on every decision - like a kind of fancy algorithmic working group.

<comment><USER4> So it sounds like voting in this system would be similar to jury duty. Except better because the voters aren't selected at random and the algorithm makes sure they are the most representative possible group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Upstaking sounds dangerously close to derivatives IMO, unless I'm understanding this all wrong, and derivatives were a big part of the global financial crisis

<comment><USER6> There is nothing particularly wrong with derivatives. They were just the vehicle used to commit a massive fraud on retirement funds. Like a truck full of boxed goods being shipped to a store, where the people packing the trucks were filling them with garbage (and occasionally drugs) and fronting the door with "real" product, then paying the inspectors to not even look in the back of the truck.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Spiral 2.0 – A Reddit-inspired local message board app - <AUTHOR> http://sprlr.com

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working on building a tool that helps you communicate not with just your friends, or those you share an interest with, but rather the community physically around you.

Got and integrated some great feedback from this community before, including adding a new Incognito post option and other social logins.

Appreciate feedback, specifically around whether we should a) Limit ability to comment/vote on posts that are far away from you, to maintain conversations local b) Whether a local ("leaderboard" / influence/ meowmeow points) would be interesting here, based on positive contributions c) Anything that would make this more useful for you and make you want to use the app more

<comment><USER2> A few points of feedback:

A) I would absolutely limit comments and votes based on geography. The last thing you want is a popular event being loaded down with "Wish I was there!" comments.

B) Internal ranking of users based on votes, propensity to contribute quality content, and activity is certainly useful. You can use this to highlight things that are sure to be high-quality events, or even give extra spotlight to users who post quality events without a lot of traction. Exposing it leads to folks attempting to game the system. Not that they won't, anyway, but it makes it a bit more opaque as to what they can and can't get rewarded for if it's obfuscated.

C) The ability to use this on the web, without having to go to my phone to check the app. I want to be able to take a quick look, send a link via IM to a friend, and meet them some place there's an event going on. If I have to do it all within the app, then I have to hope that said friend (a) has the app and (b) has it set to allow notifications. I already have set communication paths for my friends--let me use those.

To the point of using it via web and locking down the distance, you should have to either (a) allow your location to be used or (b) be able to set a home city that you can use over the web. I'm not sure what the balance of restrictions is right on the posting only locally and allowing users to set their location, but say, limit them to posting/voting on only 2 locations per session on the web or something.</comment></comment>


Scala.JS 0.6.17 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.scala-js.org/news/2017/06/04/announcing-scalajs-0.6.17/ <comment><USER2> Scala.js has been an amazing tool for my personal projects. I literally hit euphoria sometimes writing stuff in it. I am yet to truly grasp the benefits of full stack Scala (shared models, Autowire, etc.) but even for purely front- end development it's great, it beats Typescript and Flow out of the water in features, soundness and stability.

I wish I could use it at work since we (Hootsuite) already use Scala heavily on the backend, but I am reluctant in part because Scala.js does not quite have financial support of Lightbend. Or so it seems, it's a bit hard to tell where Lightbend ends and the non-profit Scala Center begins. The latter did pay to get some features implemented but reading their advisory board minutes, I'm not sure if they would have enough funding to pay for the majority of Scala.js development, which if I understand correctly happens for free as part of a PhD right now (note: my information might be wrong/outdated!)

So, if anyone involved with Scala.js is reading this and has better insights on the situation, it would be nice to know.

But I will keep using it regardless. It's marvellous.

<comment><USER3> You are mostly accurate wrt. the "financial" situation of Scala.js. Except that the Scala Center has an explicit Recommendation to "ensure the continuity of Scala.js" [1]. At least that means that, should I (the Ph.D. student doing Scala.js right now) stop working on it, the Scala Center has a mission to ensure someone keeps working on it. As with all Scala Center Recommendations, this is _not_ a guarantee. But given the popularity of Scala.js within the Scala eco-system, I am confident that solutions will be found! Read more about the Scala Center and how it works at [2]

[1] [https://github.com/scalacenter/advisoryboard/blob/master/min...](https://github.com/scalacenter/advisoryboard/blob/master/minutes/001-2016-q2.md#proposal- scp-005-ensurance-of-continuity-of-scalajs-project) [2] [https://scala.epfl.ch/](https://scala.epfl.ch/)

<comment><USER4> (Too late to edit my comment.)

Were you at ScalaDays 2017 CPH? I don't think I saw you there, but you deserve a round of applause, you Magnificent Bastard, you!

<comment><USER3> Thank you. No I wasn't there this year. I was furiously preparing this release :-p

See you probably in London for Scala eXchange ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Scala is still growing popular:

[https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=scala%2Cgo%2C...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=scala%2Cgo%2Ctypescript%2Crust)

<comment><USER6> This looks pretty good, but Google trends doesn't show any growth for functional languages over the years :(

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=scala%20programmi...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=scala%20programming,haskell%20programming,ocaml%20programming,go%20programming,python%20programming)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Scala.js author here. Ask me anything ;)

<comment><USER7> Do your know that you have done the impossible and single-handedly revived Scala? It was slowly dying two years ago, with all that Dotty uncertainty and Typesafe->Lightbend transition.

Then you came and showed us that Scala can be productively used beyond JVM. A new hope appeared, Scala-native was inspired by your example, and Dotty was upgraded from a purely academic exercise to a viable pragmatic way to Scala 3. The attitude was "if Scala.js guys did it, so can we".

So thank you, from me and all Scala hackers out there. Martin owes you a beer. :)

<comment><USER8> > Typesafe->Lightbend transition

The renaming never affected the staffing of the Scala team at Lightbend -- we've been doing about 2/3 of core Scala development (major thank you to the community for the other third!) since 2.10 (when I went from post-doc in Martin's lab to the Scala team lead position).

In my opinion, it was a good thing that feature development slowed down in Scala 2.x (while Martin pushed the research frontier forward in Dotty), so we could focus on (in no particular order) compiler performance, a new back-end and optimizer, Java 8 support, modularization,...

<comment><USER7> Yes, it all went in a good way. However, this was a scary time, observing Typesafe (now Lightbend) slowly transforming into a garden variety enterprise Java consulting shop, and watching more and more core platforms like Akka being adapted back to Java...

Things look better now. :)

<comment><USER8> Good to hear! I agree :-)

It was a necessary transition because we need to keep attracting customers that initially are reluctant to invest in Scala training. We've found our Java APIs to be a potent gateway drug to Scala, with many of our customers who begin with the Java APIs quickly realizing they'll be even more productive with Scala :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone use this?

<comment><USER10> Sure, replacing a legacy Coffeescript + jQuery app with pure Scala.js. Implementing core functionality of various jQuery plugins (Datatables, Validation, FancyBox, Bootstrap Date/Time pickers, etc.) in Scala.js. Payload is less than 50% of previous version's app bundle. You can of course pull in client-side libs as you like, but for this project it's been really nice to strip out the bloat.

Having Scala's type system on both client and server is pretty surreal, not to mention full IDE support -- the entire world of javascript just appears as you type ;-)

<comment><USER11> What's the generated file size after gzipping for the project compared to coffeescript + jquery if I may ask?

Also, can scala.js be used for progressive enhancement on static sites, or is it limited to single page apps due to the need to map scala semantics to js?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sad that Scala.js will not use WebAssembly, since WebAssembly doesn't provide GC.

<comment><USER3> WebAssembly will most likely eventually provide a GC, at which point we'll do what we can to support compiling to wasm.

See also: [https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/pull/1#discussion_r1109978...](https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/pull/1#discussion_r110997852)

<comment><USER13> They don't seem be on Chrome roadmap. We'll all grow full beards by the time DOM and GC become available. [https://wasmdash.appspot.com](https://wasmdash.appspot.com)

<comment><USER3> GC support can hardly be on Chrome's roadmap when the design of the spec has hardly anything more than "we want to have it, and here are some vague goals".

So yes, we'll grow beards, but it will happen. Remember though that wasm as whole happened in only a few years!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-03/goldman-backed-startup-optimizely-to-be-acquired-by-episerver <comment><USER3> I worked at Optimizely from before its series A in 2012 until the end of 2016, so I have a unique perspective on this. For most of the time when I worked at Optimizely, the company was all the rage. It appeared at the top of most "hot startup" lists, the Glassdoor reviews were 5/5, revenue was skyrocketing, and for a period in 2014 it became the fourth most valuable YCombinator company (after Stripe, AirBnB, and Dropbox). Of course, Optimizely's success was't guaranteed. In 2015, the company abandoned the self-serve market that had driven its original momentum and pivoted instead to vague and indefinite enterprise offerings that were (and are) hidden behind schizophrenic marketing, an impossible sales process, terrible customer service and a general approach of trying to extract the maximum amount of money from clients rather than providing them with value. From 2015 on, everything (including the internal culture) became mumbo-jumbo, a cloud of dishonesty. I used to be able to explain what Optimizely did to my grandmother; now I don't even really understand it myself.

Th Episerver acquisition is indeed a bad exit, and I think I will lose >$100k in stock I exercised (which is OK, I'll be fine). But I hope all readers will take from this saga a lesson in humility and the pitfalls of intellectual dishonesty and hubris. Just because your startup is skyrocketing isn't enough. Success is not guaranteed. Your company's leadership needs to be honest with itself, which Optimizely's leadership was not. They need to be humble and work hard, which Optimizely did not do.

<comment><USER4> I have a sort of general question about this narrative, which seems to apply to lots of startups that begin as self-service, developer-focused projects and end in enterprise hell.

Is it not the case that these startups begin developer-facing, get market traction, are lavishly funded, and then discover that the self-service offering they've built simply can't satisfy the projections they've made to justify their valuation?

Which is to say: would Optimizely be doing much better if they hadn't pivoted into enterprise hell? Or would they be a much smaller company?

I see why customers would have a strong preference! But it's less clear to me what the right decision for the business is. But I'm just asking!

<comment><USER5> I worked at Optimizely for 4 years and can tell you that pivoting to Enterprise has been one of the best company decisions.

One of the important distinctions between Optimizely and most developer-first platforms is that experimentation is a hard practice to pick up. Most companies have difficulties getting their programs off the ground and keeping them funded, let alone grow or scale them. Small digital businesses struggle more for several reasons: 1) they have few resources, so teams are understaffed and resources are pulled easily, 2) they have little money, so the percentage uplifts are rarely motivating, 3) they have little traffic, so it is harder to get a statistically significant measure in their experiments

Because of these issues, Optimizely always had really poor retention in the SMB space. Nonetheless, the SMB customers helped Optimizely build up a brand name, build up legions of practitioners, and get the skills and experience to go after the Enterprise market. When Optimizely started acquiring enterprise customers, retention improved substantially.

This isn't to say that there aren't lots of problems with Enterprise sales and that Optimizely didn't make tons of cultural mistakes in that pivot. But on the core financials, Enterprise kept Optimizely afloat. The problem wasn't the pivot to enterprise, but the trade-offs that were mismanaged along the way. The path to enterprise was inevitable and correct.

<comment><USER3> First off, love the username :-).

You argue that pivoting from self-serve to enterprise was one of the company's best decisions. If that were true, Optimizely would be considerably more valuable now than it was four years ago, which is manifestly not the case.

Moreover, if the self serve model was indeed fatally flawed, then it would not be possible for anyone to build a profitable business serving this segment. However, a competitor, VWO, showed that it is possible to build a large, profitable business using this model.

Finally, let's say my prior two arguments are wrong, and the unit economics of the self serve business were fundamentally flawed--an assertion I challenge-- the self serve business would still have been useful as a source for attracting future enterprise customers. When Optimizely cut the self serve plans, it also killed its largest source of enterprise deals.

<comment><USER5> Richard, I appreciate your theoretical arguments. Consider me the applied physicist who has actually seen the data. :)

On the valuation. Optimizely's pre-exit valuation rose in every VC round since changing the focus of the business from SMB (Series B) to Mid-Market (Series C) to Enterprise (Series D). The valuation of the exit took a hit for reasons that were not the enterprise focus. I could say more here, but consciously choose not to.

The self-serve model at Optimizely was certainly flawed. If VWO was able to build it profitably, that's likely because their labor costs, being based in India, are substantially lower than Optimizely's. Keeping a legion of engineers funded in SF has very different unit economics than keeping engineers funded in India.

Now on your last argument, that self-serve customers could acquire enterprise accounts, I certainly agree. If that strategy were better executed, it could have created a valuable pipeline. But the self-serve to enterprise funnel was sorely lacking, and when self-serve was cancelled, the business benefited financially and migrated everyone to the new pricing model for substantial success.

Its easy to look at Optimizely's final fortunes and link that to the enterprise approach, and I won't argue they're completely unrelated, but there were very different factors that caused Optimizely to fold into EPi's acquisition spree.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for making these points. They seem less hyperbolic and more grounded than your earlier claim ("it was one of optimizely's best decisions") and I appreciate that change in tone.

You characterize my arguments as theoretical, but they are empirical. Optimizely's valuation _didn 't_ increase after the decision to kill self serve was made, and VWO _was_ able to build a successful business without killing self serve.

Also, as you now agree, optimizely would have had a better source of enterprise deals with self serve intact. That's important.

Stepping back, every SaaS business has issues converting self serve users to enterprise. Fixing those issues takes hard work, which optimizely was not willing to do. Similarly, every business has higher churn in monthly self serve plans than annual enterprise plans. Fixing this takes hard work too. Things were not unsolvable, optimizely simply had no appetite for solving them.

To address your other points: 1\. I donbt that labor costs would have made a difference, but say they would have. Was anything stopping optimizely from reducing costs to have overseas development in india? 3\. Your comments about the various foci at different rounds of funding is irrelevant. I'm not arguing that building an enterprise business is bad, I'm arguing that killing self serve was bad.

Ultimately, as Dan predicted in 2013, Optimizely died of indigestion rather than starvation; the market was always there, and still is.

Hope this helps clarify my position, even if we still disagree. If you send me an email, I'd be happy to help squash your skepticism about the $100k too.

PS. I don't think that killing self serve was the only thing that led to optimizely's demise, but I do think it was a factor.

<comment><USER6> "Optimizely died of indigestion rather than starvation" while it might be true, not sure if Dan ever admitted anything close to that in public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I interviewed for a marketing role at Optimizely back in 2013...I passed all the interviews with the team and then had a final, short interview with the CEO. He asked me a few basic questions and then asked 'if you only had 3 years to live, would you work at Optimizely?'. I responded honestly and said no. Said that I'd love to work here to help and grow the business, learn, and further my own career but if I had only had 3 years to live I'd spend my time differently. The hiring manager called the next day and said I would not receive an offer and when I asked him if it was because the answer to that question he said yes. That made it obvious they had a strange and not particularly healthy culture...lucky for me as I ended up at a much more successful early stage startup where I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish.

<comment><USER8> Over the years I A/B tested each of my interview questions in order to better measure what I was looking for. It sounds like you might have been asked an early version of one of the questions I used to ask so sorry you didn't get the "optimized" version. (there was a big difference in responses between only 3 years and 10 years to live)

Also, to clarify, I used to end my interviews with TWO questions: (1) if you had 10 years to live, what would you do? [wait for answer] (2) if you had 10 years to live, would you take this job?

The things I was assessing in these questions were candor, intellectual honesty, and passion. Sure, it would be great if people authentically were passionate about taking the job if they had ten years to live. That was a tiny minority of responses.

The only "wrong" answer to these question was when someone would answer YES to the second question after clearly answering something completely different to the first one. For example, if someone would say travel the world to #1 and yes to #2.

The reason why this measured candor was because if someone could tell me to my face during an interview they wouldn't take this job, then I knew they would tell me to my face when something was broken in the company after I hired them. I was looking for the exact opposite of what this thread implies I was looking for. I didn't want ass kissers. I wanted truth tellers.

<comment><USER9> Reading the op's post and your reply, I can only come up with two possible conclusions:

1\. The op is lying about his experience.

He states he answered NO to question 2, which is what you claim to be looking for. Unless his answer to question 1 was "Work for Optimizely" (which, I guess, someone might say, maybe) then I don't see how you get a contradiction. By your logic, he would have been a hire.

2\. The recruiter lied to him about why he was rejected.

Maybe everyone got a short sit down with the CEO back then and he took that to mean he passed all the other interviews? Maybe something else didn't check out and that was an easy way to let him down?

Anyway, if you're A/B testing, wouldn't you hire people regardless of their answers and then assess their performance over a longer timeframe to determine the efficacy of the questions and answers?

<comment><USER8> Not sure exactly what happened but I did personally interview the first hundred employees so that means I probably interviewed him or her and would have done so regardless of how the other interviewers felt about the candidate. My interview feedback was treated like the rest and I rarely if ever vetoed a hire if everyone else was unanimously in support.

And you are right, I did hire people regardless of their answers to some questions and I would then assess how they turned out to figure out if my questions were any good. I basically gave everyone I interviewed a pass on at least one question even if they bombed it abysmally. Some of those folks turned out to be our best employees so I learned to never hold one bad answer against someone. It also gave me a dataset to improve my questions for the next wave of candidates.

<comment><USER10> Of all the questions I've been asked in interviews over the course of my career, this is the only one I can actually still remember to this day. Partially because it's extremely unique. And partially because I was fairly certain at the time, judging by the look on your face, that I'd completely bombed it. (Also reading your explanation above, I now KNOW that I bombed it.)

Anyway, I'll attest to the fact that Dan at least didn't veto all candidates purely on the basis of their response to this question (unless I was the result of a massive clerical error).

Outcomes aside, I'm very thankful for my experience at Optimizely. My time there was a major inflection point for me both personally and professionally. I wouldn't be as effective in the workplace as I am today—nor would I have some of my most meaningful friendships—had I not cut my teeth at 631 Howard — thanks Dan (and Pete, if you're reading this too).

EDIT: Also considering the timeline and the role described in the OP's message, there's a nonzero chance we were interviewing for the same role. Small world!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just kicked the tires on Optimizely for a site with less than a million MAU. They wanted $50K upfront for one year. No monthly or quarterly billing available. Went with Google Optimize instead, works fine for free. In the face of that, very surprised Optimizely doesn't do month to month to get folks started.

<comment><USER12> It's worse. They essentially kicked-out their existing self-serve customers in the process. We were on the (at the time) silver plan, but when we were ready to upgrade to gold, there was no gold, no silver, nothing... Just some super- expensive and vague enterprise plan.

But there's a silver lining: we created and open-sourced Alephbet[0] - <USER2> simple A/B testing platform together with a couple of backend options with AWS Lambda/redis[1] and couldn't be happier :)

[0] [https://github.com/alephbet/alephbet](https://github.com/alephbet/alephbet)

[1] [https://github.com/Alephbet/lamed](https://github.com/Alephbet/lamed)

<comment><USER13> Thanks for this, also I love the name :p

<comment><USER14> Actually it's a great idea to name your projects with Hebrew letters. "Shinbet" sounds cool ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> (co-founder of Optimizely here)

HUGE thank you to YC and the entire HN community for all their support over the years. It was almost ten years ago that we launched here on HN. [1]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1788634](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1788634)

<comment> mh- thanks for an amazing culture and experience at Optimizely, Dan.

<comment><USER15> Ditto!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Dan, Paras from VWO here.

Congratulations for the acquisition. We've enjoyed competing with Optimizely over last the last 10 years, and certainly learned a lot in the process. Hopefully, that will continue even after the acquisition.

The way we look at things, experimentation as a market is certainly in an early phase. The more complex the world becomes, the more necessary experimentation becomes to understand what customers really want.

As an aside, it is true though that for experimentation to work, a company needs to be ready for it. Their culture needs to support being proven wrong and having patience to build momentum of wins over the long term. Any org with a short term horizon will likely see experimentation as a cost without corresponding returns. But companies that really see long term - think Amazon - ground themselves in experimentation.

Of course, not every company can be Amazon but our belief is that more companies will start realizing that there's no alternative to developing a culture of experimentation. This is why we're excited about the market. For us, at VWO, it still seems day 1 :)

</comment><comment><USER17> This sounds like a bad exit. From what I can tell the original Optimizely space has been slowly becoming a more discrete area of progressive delivery, rather than an industry on its own.

Many players have jumped into this space with their own A/B testing and Feature Flags solutions as part of their total offering, many of those offerings being free, open source or cheaper. Also potentially better in the concrete tasks they enable. I doubt that Optimizely's feature flag offering is superior to something more specialized like LaunchDarkly.

Also there are a couple of strong incumbents' solutions like Google Optimize and Adobe Target and it's always hard to go against incumbents specially when the incumbents are coming after you and not the other way around.

One clear problem for Optimizely in this space is that experience optimization became a function of marketing departments through out the years but for a while they were positioning themselves as a developer tool. This go-to-market strategy opened a lot of opportunities for other players who saw a bigger market when selling the same type of solution to Marketing Departments.

Maybe I'm wrong but it seems that they just stopped growing and have been experiencing a lot of customer churn since this is likely an expensive product with a hard to calculate ROI. They're probably still selling a lot but nowhere near to the original investor expectations / close to becoming profitable.

<comment><USER18> Google Optimize & VWO hurt them. Free, or low price, low friction won at scale with smaller teams running 1-2 experiments or low level personalization. Everyone I know who's going to high volume testing is either on a hosted CMS that has this baked into their offering or JAMStack.

No one I know has deployed Optimizely since 15/16.

<comment><USER19> Optimizely's pricing makes no sense for small teams but VWO and Optimize cannot compete on features that start to become very useful as your experimentation and personalization efforts increase.

Any roll-your-own experimentation platforms take considerable resources to make accessible to those in the organization interested in using it (product, marketing, etc.)

<comment><USER20> In my experience, I agree the core functionality (variant management, remote config, etc.) is relatively small amount of effort compared to the interfaces to make it accessible to those non-technical orgs, like you mention.

However, we found that those interfaces only allow very limited, shallow tests and you very quickly outgrow them as an organization. In other words, once you reach diminishing returns on button color and header text optimizations, you start wanting to test deeper UI experiences and complicated user flows. At that point, you have to involve engineering anyway.

When an organization has engineers who are motivated by business metrics, they have no problem implementing shallow tests (like button colors) while working on tests of the deeper UI experiences as well. And at that point, the non- technical interfaces have little value.

<comment><USER19> I wasn't really talking towards the WYSIWYG editors. Those are trash on all platforms and fall apart quickly for all but the most simple tests.

Metric + page management, results analysis, segmentation, etc. all work better in Optimizely than they do in other platforms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A few years ago, we were a monthly customer of Optimizely for a few hundred dollars a month. Reasonable for a startup.

Then they went to the annual cost of $30K+ upfront and ended all monthly options. They had to move to high cost, high touch to compete with the free/cheap offerings to stay in business. This acquisition suggests that didn't work.

We ended up building randomization, remote config, and logging ourselves, and did the analysis with our existing stuff.

</comment><comment><USER21> I used to work two desks over from Dan at the Obama campaign in Chicago in 2007, when he was developing and testing an early proof of concept of what would become Optimizely. He was able to increase fundraising performance significantly by doing (what would now be considered simple) A/B tests. He's sharp and tenacious, identified a market ahead of its time and invented a new product category.

Whether or not this is a "good" exit, it's a great accomplishment for Dan and the team and can't wait to see what they do next!

<comment><USER22> Didn't they work on an educational game first? Or something about carrots and sticks? I liked their story when I read about them ages ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I remember meeting Dan, the founding CEO of Optimizely, at winter 2010 YC demo day. I had just grabbed my name tag and was walking toward the building when he stopped me outside to give me the pitch. He immediately struck me as a smart, capable guy, but as a former software engineer I couldn't understand why companies wouldn't just build A/B testing themselves. What did Optimizely add? How was it defensible? Dan didn't answer the questions to my satisfaction so I thanked him and moved on. As the years went by and I saw them raise round after round, get great press, put up billboards, and build out a beautiful office that I walked by at least once a week, I felt terrible for missing out on the angel investment. I was a rookie investor (I think that was my first YC) and chalked it up to my inexperience. I even tried to extract "lessons learned" and apply them to similar investment opportunities. It feels bittersweet to see things end this way, with probably no return for the common and a haircut for investors. I had built them up and expected them to succeed but I guess it's good to know I was right. Lessons: It ain't over 'til it's over and vanity traction like press & billboards mean nothing. Don't build a big company on a bad idea, it's a waste of time and money for everyone, especially the founders & employees.

<comment><USER24> BTW, I'm not sure if you would have expected them to get to $100m in ARR either when you passed on them because you were skeptical of the market. There's a lot between $1m to $100m ARR that can go wrong. In this case, I don't think it was the market opportunity.

<comment><USER23> Did they reach $100m ARR? If so that's impressive, a lot more than I would have guessed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In 2014 I wrote an article on why Optimizely's approach to AB testing was statistically flawed [1]. I was working at a competitor so I needed to be a bit circumspect.

It was discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7287665](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7287665)

I always wondered how they got away with it for so long.

[1] [http://www.datascienceassn.org/sites/default/files/Most%20Wi...](http://www.datascienceassn.org/sites/default/files/Most%20Winning%20A-B%20Test%20Results%20are%20Illusory.pdf)

<comment><USER26> It's a bit breathtaking how basic the statistics knowledge is to make this critique (not complaining about the critique, mind you). I'm startled that this was coming as news to anyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Completely unsurprised.

Experimentation-done-right is too expensive and too ambiguous to sell as a product. Every product experiment requires a complex set up, a lengthy running period across a huge base of users, and then heavy analysis in order to achieve statistical confidence over a specific feature's impact on a business metric. That "confidence" is often represented by a subpercentage point that may or may not be statistically significant. Fun problem for the data scientist, plain hell for the PM.

In my company which uses experimentation for everything, each A/B test requires _two weeks_ before the Product Manager can even see the results. Two weeks of waiting for a confusing, contradictory dashboard that can't be taken at face value, that needs careful, human analysis before it can be called a "win".

That slowness is fine for high-traffic, high-risk & high-value lines of business. But it's not fine when you're releasing feature that aren't just optimizations.

Competitors like LaunchDarkly and Split.io have recognized that critical difference, I think. They know that causality is expensive, and are particularly aware that the fine line between feature release and metrics impact is tied too heavily with a company's politics, i.e. it chafes against the intuition of executives.

Instead, they offer experimentation as an add-on to their developer tools. You can experiment if you need to, but it doesn't obligate you to do so.

That goal is much more realistic than the Optimizely's current goal: "helping our customers win in a digital-first world".

<comment><USER28> Agree. Plus I'd also like to highlight how experimentation platforms/tools are sold as 'conversion uplifter'. All orgs are looking for solutions to take their conversion graphs up and to the right. And they are ready to pay hefty sums for any tool that speaks to this motivation.

But then they are asked to wait! Wait for the concept to mature within the org. Time being of critical importance most orgs end up getting frustrated as what they initially started with doesn't hold true now. And when you already have lots of money, it's easy to switch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I count 18 sentences of fluff/framing before they say who is acquiring them. Talk about burying the lede!

18 seems like an outlier, but for press releases I've read in the "we've been acquired" category, I'd guess that the median is > 10\. Does anyone have first-hand knowledge about why these statements are released in this teasing way?

<comment><USER30> I'd say it's just a PR tactic to make such things seem like "big news," when, in fact, such acquisitions are a fairly normal thing in the tech world. It's hard to even buy that kind of publicity, so one has to take advantage of it when one can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The problem I had with Optimizely when it was the go-to solution, was that it had a truly problematic impact on front-end performance due to the blocking way its script was loaded and page variants introduced. In some cases page loads were blocked by up around 5 seconds.

For obvious reasons it was tricky to run an A/B test just for testing the impact of Optimizely's script itself. But the key issue is that all the similar tools at the time (Optimizely not being the only culprit here) were determined to not required developer effort, which led to poor overall performance.

Then React et al came along and took ownership of the DOM, which meant adding tools which also manipulated the DOM became even more problematic.

Fortunately tools like Launch Darkly and Split solve this problem in a better way (high performance full-stack feature flags), even if it does mean developer effort to add tests. Optimizely did eventually launch their own version of this, but never really won back the developer mindshare.

Ultimately, it seems Optimizely enjoyed a few years of success, but a combination of developers getting more concerned with performance and the front-end world moving on to different architectures, seemed to lead to its decline.

<comment><USER32> Back in 2015 I was pitching Optimizely internally. We already had an in house barebones A/B testing tool. Once I got over that hurdle our CTO let fly how his only experience using Optimizely had been a time when Optimizely went down and took his site down with it. Optimizely eventually brought out their head of product, and an army of senior engineers to convince him things were good now. We signed an annual contract, but Optimizely was never added to any page that was revenue critical/dependent on speed. Optimizely got their huge contract, and in the end marketing and design got their lightweight A/B testing tool, but we never realized the white paper level metrics jumps because it was never used on any page that would actually have material impact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Congrats Optimizely from you friends at Convert.com (A/B testing tool that keeps the prices online)

</comment><comment><USER34> Are there any good open source alternatives to Optimizely that can be self hosted?

I'm aware of Wasabi[1], but I believe it's abandonware at this point.

[1] [https://github.com/intuit/wasabi](https://github.com/intuit/wasabi)

</comment><comment><USER35> Another proof point that once the founder-CEO is replaced by a professional CEO, it's game over more often than not. This happened in 2017 at Optimizely.

<comment><USER36> Happening right now at UserTesting. As the CMO would say: "yay!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> UpGrade [1] is an open-source A/B testing platform for education software. We want to make it easy for education software companies to pilot new materials and measure efficacy. We hope this can help optimize student outcomes and help advance the science of learning. Would love any feedback -- we just launched!

[1] [https://upgrade-platform.org/](https://upgrade-platform.org/)

</comment><comment><USER37> I would not want to be Optimizely and have to compete against a strong free offering like Google Optimize.

<comment><USER38> I use Google Optimize. I wouldn't call the free offering "strong."

There is a limit of about six experiments at one time. Each experiment can have up to 8 variants. And if you want more, then be ready to shell out thousands per month (I forget the exact number, but that's the ballpark).

Overall, if I were to redo things, I'd probably be better off just using Google analytics events.

Edit: that said, I'd never use a piece of bloatware like Optimizely for just the split-testing feature. If your product would benefit from split testing, then include it as a feature. It's not a "hard" feature/problem to implement into just about any existing product that would benefit from it.

<comment><USER19> Optimize can run five experiments at a time and it only lets you measure 3 metrics. Any other metrics need to be analyzed in GA and will almost certainly end up sampled and unreliable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Congrats, Dan! :)

</comment><comment><USER40> Hello, Jean-Noel here, from Kameleoon (also a competitor to Optimizely, but mostly serving European markets so far). First off, congrats to Optimizely / Dan and co for the acquisition. For us Optimizely has always been a role model, especially from the technical side of things (I'm the founder of Kameleoon, but currently serving as CTO, so obviously I have a tech background). Optimizely was (and still is, in many ways) a great platform. And it did create (or at least, heavily helped develop) a whole market. However I agree with Feynman's comment, the main problem with this company (and even looking from aside, it was quite obvious for us) was that they raised way too much money and made promises to their investors that were completely impossible to fulfill. Basically, it looked like they wanted to be compared to AirBNB, but their potential was honestly never the same, and this was quite clear from someone with a little insight into the business. Because of that, they started making mistakes after mistakes, burned way too much money and it all went downhill.

They're not the only ones with that problem - almost all competitors / actors in the field raised too much for the side of the market, from my opinion. Dynamic Yield is probably the one that did the best at that game, with a great exit when the hype was at its peak. But all the other ones are clearly in trouble (even Optimizely exit, I am sure, is clearly not a success for their investors, etc). The only actor that has a reasonable overall strategy is VWO (somebody asked if they're were profitable - of course they are, since they did not receive any funding, they have to. While Optimizely clearly never was), because it stayed lean and avoided the pitfalls of over investments (going to all continents on the planet, having 20 offices all over the world, etc). Hats off to Paras for that. We try to stick to the same strategy at Kameleoon, even if we had to raise a bit of capital. But you don't need to raise $200 millions to have a great CRO platform - we proved this for a fact.

About the switch to Enterprise - anyone in this industry will tell you it was absolutely necessary. Impossible to sell experimentation to SMB and expect to be profitable, you need larger customers. Because contrarily to Mailchimp for instance, a SMB customer paying $50 (or even $500) per month for a CRO platform won't be able to operate it on its own and will churn. The problem with Optimizely pivot to Enterprise is not the pivot in itself, it's how they did it (I heard some horrors stories from people inside Optimizely, not sure if they are true, but one thing is clear - it did not go well).

Anyway, it's still an exciting field, from the technical side of things, there are still many innovations to be done and we hope to spearhead that at Kameleoon :-)

</comment><comment><USER41> I hope the founder exited well. I remember working with him at Google when he was the PM for Google Optimizer. Nice guy.

<comment><USER42> I don't. The founders pushed people who trusted them to work hard and value the company over their own needs. While the founders and their friends were able to pull out equity, every one else was told that they had to wait their turn, which never came.

If Dan and Pete were nice guys, they would have take care of the employees that built their company. The employees wouldn't have been millionaires, but they might be able to scrape together a down payment for a house. And not like the mansion that Dan has, just something that would move them out of the fear of rents increasing and losing their jobs.

They used to be nice guys. I don't wish ill towards them, but they do not deserve a good exit with this.

<comment><USER27> Wasn't Dan or Pete forced to step down on account of gross incompetence? I recall there being some internal drama about their departure.

<comment><USER8> Haha, certainly no drama and no one forced us or even asked us to step down. I wrote a blog post about it: [https://link.medium.com/mHgtiQ3bu9](https://link.medium.com/mHgtiQ3bu9)

<comment><USER43> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24368516](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24368516)

If you don't mind answering, what's the strategy behind a hiring tactic like the one in the link above? It seems cartoonish and not grounded in reality....

<comment><USER8> Sure, I just responded because you asked so nicely. :)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24369766](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24369766)

<comment><USER43> Haha sorry for the snark but I really appreciated your follow up! We're thinking about hiring at our company and your framing was useful to read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Worked at a company that considered Optimizely for one of their possible A/B solutions. We went with another vendor, but I then ended up writing an in- house solution that took about a month [w/o analytics].

It is very easy to implement this in-house so long as you own the systems and don't outsource [too much].

</comment><comment><USER45> I used their paid product once and failed to buy it two times after that.

They tried to move up-market and did it in an unreasonably difficult way in my opinion. It was easier to do business with ORACLE and then Google. The sales folks didn't listen, their proposals ignored our requirements, it was a mess.

I hope the staff got something.

</comment><comment><USER46> Maybe I haven't worked in tech long enough, but am I the only one who has never heard of Episerver?

<comment><USER47> It's an old-school enterprise CMS. And a crummy one. It's done a pretty remarkable job of staying relevant all things considered. The current market leader in this space is Adobe who own AEM and bought Omniture years ago so they can offer analytics and A/B testing in one bill of sale. Episerver must be working to position themselves the same way.

Lot of big enterprises buy these kind of systems and pay through the nose for them.

<comment><USER48> Episerver for a while was one of the main competitors of Sitecore in the IIS/.Net Enterprise CMS space. Both were European (Swedish and Danish respectively)

I built sites with both back in the late '00 and while Sitecore was marginally better I don't miss working with either.

Adobe also bought Magento, while not as bad as Omniture, has it's own levels of hell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> As someone not too familiar with the ins and outs of acquisitions or IPOs... is it unusual to get acquired after laying off a big chunk of your staff? Is that an indicator that they probably accepted a lower valuation than they would have before that layoff?

<comment><USER31> I worked for a startup that basically let 90% of its engineering team quit due to low morale over the course of a year without making any effort to (a) stop the exodus, or (b) replace them. When they exited about 6 months later, it became pretty clear that it was intentional.

<comment><USER49> Sorry for my daftness, but what is the incentive behind intentionally losing a bunch of staff before 'exiting'? Just to reduce your cash burn?

<comment><USER50> Mostly to get better profitability numbers to show to potential acquirers

<comment><USER31> Exactly. A small number of us were offered packages to incentivise us to stay (ironically we still left), but the vast majority weren't. Which led us to conclude that the plan was to just keep everything afloat long enough to sell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I worked at Optimizely for 2.5 years and left as recently as February. I'll be grateful for the experience of selling experimentation into the European market, even if Optimizely was on a flat trajectory. It is one of the most difficult things to sell. The problem with experimentation is you are selling hard work. Everyone says they want to be data-driven, but no one wants to do hard work. No one wants to tell an executive he/she is wrong and their idea sucks. No one wants to do the work of building a culture. It is akin to selling religion.

I'll be most proud of the companies I sold to that then started doing internal webinars on how to do hypothesis-driven product development and really engaging in bottoms-up approach to experimentation. Those deals took 12-36 months to close, but you felt like you were changing how they ran their business.

I see a lot of folks throwing shade on Optimizely here. I think that is ridiculous. Not many companies can grow to 300 employees and over $75 million in annual revenues. Even fewer companies get to IPO. Everyone's thoughts about how Optimizely used to be worth more are BS. Valuations are perceptions of product/market strength rather than the reality. We shouldn't be looking at this as a failure. Rather we should look at this as a natural course of a business finding its product/market fit.

Form a market perspective, Optimizely was hemmed in by big players like Adobe and Oracle who bought competitors to round out their marketing suites. Adobe and Oracle do not care about their experimentation products and will give it away for pennies, so it isn't like they are driving innovation. On the low- end, Optimizely created a bunch of fast followers. VWO, ABTasty and Kameleoon, just to name a few copied not only the Optimizely tech but also their marketing in some cases and then just sold for cheaper. Ultimately, the market decided that Experimentation technology just wasn't super valuable (you still need to generate the test idea yourself). The technology could be copied easily and many people didn't care enough about it to change their cultures.

Outside of the market forces, Optimizely definitely made some mistakes. You could make the argument that pricing and product development had issues in the past few years.

I think those were not the core issues. I think the basic mistakes they made were in execution. It is less sexy to talk about but ultimately if you have a great product and a need in the market, you still can't win if you don't execute properly.

Marketing execution was poor, Sales enablement was haphazard, Partnerships with other tech firms or agencies changed almost daily, and culturally, the organisation struggled to maintain the original culture it had around transparency. It failed to realise that competitors had caught up to a bunch of core functionality it thought was unique. It failed to market the new features that were differentiable. It is easy to blame pricing or moving into "enterprise" as the issue because that is what people see on the outside. I think that is unfair. Many companies have done the same thing and it worked. It is all down to execution.

Ultimately, I think Optimizely built a real market and culture in the tech world that experimentation matters and data matters. The fact that you have a ton of copycat companies prove that others see it as valuable as well (I wonder how they'll fair in the future). Regardless of where it goes as part of Episerver, it will have brought loads of people into the world of experimentation, and I think that is a good thing for the world.

<comment><USER40> Agree with Paras there, VWO was not a follower, they started at the same time. These things are actually funny - I even started Kameleoon before Optimizely (early 2008), but we developed our visual editor first and did not apply it to AB testing at the beginning. We made a (successful) pivot at the end of 2011 and have been focusing on CRO since, becoming competitors to Optimizely & others.

Calling Optimizely's competitors simple followers is clearly an over- simplification and a bias from the VC/SF crow indeed. As Paras pointed out, every actor in the field had their firsts in the market (some of Kameleoon's examples: our anti-flickering technology, our aggregation features in our reports / data engine, our automatic cross-device history reconciliation or our full ITP support). In many ways, Optimizely tech is now trailing behind today.

However it's true that Optimizely (and to a lesser measure, VWO) did a lot from the marketing side to develop the market, and we benefited quite a bit from that. We're definitely grateful to them :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> [https://archive.is/Sz20v](https://archive.is/Sz20v)

</comment><comment><USER53> Any alternatives to Optimizely?

<comment><USER54> [https://vwo.com/](https://vwo.com/) is closest and better in a lot of aspects, check more here : [https://vwo.com/compare/optimizely/](https://vwo.com/compare/optimizely/). Full disclosure - I work for VWO

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Shot themself in the foot. RIP.

</comment><comment><USER56> Sounds like they're having financial trouble and needed to sell. I'm hearing this will likely result in nothing for employees.

<comment><USER56> If you're going to downvote please explain. Replies after mine with inside information agreed with me.</comment></comment>


Driving Formula E's game-changing electric racecar - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/31/18646098/formula-e-gen2-drive-electric-racecar <comment><USER2> Formula E uploads races to YouTube which makes it easy to watch. Here are the races for season 5:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiSlrzIEN5WJEbJIdK3jD...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiSlrzIEN5WJEbJIdK3jDxcX2ka7qZHH8)</comment>


A sneak peek inside a NordVPN server - <AUTHOR> https://www.techradar.com/news/a-look-inside-a-vpn-server <comment><USER2> NordVPN is quite dangerous

</comment><comment><USER3> The industry is getting more transparent! Cool

</comment><comment><USER4> all I've seen today is corona this corona that, finally something nice to read thats not about it.. thank you</comment>


Show HN: My iPad app Etude got acquired by Steinway & Sons - <AUTHOR> http://dangrover.com/2011/09/11/etude-acquired/

<comment><USER2> Congrats! Ever since I watched "Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037" ([http://movies.netflix.com/Movie/Note-by-Note-The-Making- of-S...](http://movies.netflix.com/Movie/Note-by-Note-The-Making-of- Steinway-L1037/70082641)), I've had the impression that Steinway are a really great innovative tech company whose employees care about their work and their craft - not unlike a great software company, but in a different medium.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats! I've been looking at a way of jumpstarting my piano learning (or re- learning) and this looks like a great way. Would love to hear any other recommendations from HN musicians.

<comment><USER4> Also fun if you have a MIDI keyboard: <http://synthesiagame.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title link points to the wrong place. It should be: <http://dangrover.com/2011/09/13/etude-acquired/>

(13, not 11.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Just changed the date back to the wrong date so the original link works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congats! I never heard of Etude, but looks really cool. Gonna go get it (if it's still available).

</comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for the shout-out. It was lots of fun :)

<comment><AUTHOR> This guy is a badass and solved some huge technical problems in implementing the app. If you're hiring and you need a badass, talk to him!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congrats! Looks like a beautiful app.</comment>


Should politicians' sexual behavior be private? - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-bader-dmh/everything-said-about-ant_b_872346.html

<comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr Since Weiner's sex life is private his only wrongdoing in this affair is because he made the Democrats lose a valuable candidate for NYT Mayor.

The wrongness of this essay goes to the heart of the matter, I think. When the (similar) Strauss-Kahn affair surfaced recently the overwhelming French response was that he was tricked and that this was his private life anyway. One aspect of why people were angry with Strauss-Kahn was that he got himself out of the presidential race, and caused Le Pen to get more votes. This is, in essence, exactly what this essay says for Rep. Weiner.

I find such an "us vs. them" mentality abhorrent, where when someone from "our" camp screws up we get more angry with them for making "us" look bad rather than what they did. Politicians should be held to a higher standard in their private lives than normal people, if you cannot handle this (or don't want to) then don't go into politics. Things that can be deemed OK (and legal) for normal people, i.e. sending a shirtless photo of yourself to a woman on Craigslist, having sex with a prostitute (e.g. in Nevada) are off-limits for politicians.

Another interesting point is that such behavior in these men (they are almost exclusively men) are not isolated incidents: Strauss-Kahn had a history of aggressive women groping, Weiner was sexting with six women, etc., so we can't write it off as a momentary lapse of reason. This is exactly "broad generalizations made nowadays about the sex and powerful men" that evidence shows to be true again and again and that Bader calls bullshit, because he's blinded by his political agenda.

</comment><comment><USER2> Of course it should! That way, they're more, um, pliable, when the FBI or NSA gets hold of evidence of some 2-sigma behavior on the part of a Senator or Congressman.

No? Well, why do you think that FISA rubber stamps every single warrant request they get? Why does the US Congress not get outraged over 4th Amendment violations like the NSA dragnet wiretaps? Why does the Black Budget just get bigger and bigger without any question?</comment>