20 Top Personal Development Blogs for 2019 - <AUTHOR> I'm compiling a list of "20 Top Personal Development Blogs For 2019". Got any favorites to suggest? Thanks. <comment><USER2> stevepavlina.com - It's not a patch on what it was in its heyday but I still check a few times a year.

jamesaltucher.com - I can't say I've ever actually learned anything useful on the site, but I still enjoy James's writing. I found a few of the podcasts of interest - although most is the usual baloney of people thinking they are God's Gift and are just there to flog their tat.

lifepassionandbusiness.com - new but I have listened to most of the podcasts and I like the questions the presenter (Paul Harvey) asks. By having a set set of questions for all guests it keeps things on point and not just about how wonderful the guests are (in their own estimation) as on some other podcasts.

[https://www.gogently.co/listen-to-a-podcast](https://www.gogently.co/listen- to-a-podcast) \- blog/podcast with Michael Nobbs. Not personal development per se, but I think we could all do with slowing down a bit. Michael's a great presenter and should probably be hired by the BBC! :)

[https://seths.blog/](https://seths.blog/) \- again not strictly personal development, but there are usually useful life tips to be picked up.

[https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/](https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/) \- some life changing content in there. Depends where you are in the journey though. For some all this falls on deaf ears, but if you've made a lost a fortune a couple of times this could help get you on the straight and narrow!

[https://www.alastairhumphreys.com/](https://www.alastairhumphreys.com/) \- probably one of the best things you can do if you are serious about personal development is get your teeth stuck into a big hairy adventure that makes your balls shrivel - if so Alastair's your goto guy!

Just a few to get you started...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. That's a fantastic list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [http://cogzest.com](http://cogzest.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do you mean self improvement, or small software development blogs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Self improvement - as in personal development, improving focus, better concentration, beating procrastination and being more efficient. Thanks.</comment></comment>


On Giving Technical Talks[2010] - <AUTHOR> http://erdani.com/index.php/articles/tech-talk-tips

<comment><USER2> That was some really great advice and I like the fact that he kept coming back to confidence. Confidence in your subject, your ability to deliver and in the quality of your presentation is key.

One thing I would add though is regarding visuals. If you present with a slide deck make sure there is an absolute minimum of words on each slide. People will read every slide you put up, and while they are reading, they are not listening to you. The human brain just isn't modeled to be able to handle listening to one thing, while reading another.

</comment><comment><USER3> thanks for the tips. I have the problem where I start out pretty confident but as I get into the speech sometimes I start getting nervous that I'm losing everybody's interest and so I think my presentation sometimes gets worse as it goes on.

<comment><USER4> Try cutting out some of the stuff people tend to find boring. Or change the way it's presented.

Maybe your audience doesn't understand what you're trying to tell, maybe they already know.

Try to adapt on the fly.</comment></comment>


Apiary.io API Design Stack raised $6.8M - <AUTHOR> http://blog.apiary.io/2015/08/18/Proud-to-Announce-our-Series-A/

<comment><USER2> Congratulations to Jakub and team! You your original room at Keboola is still there if you need more space :)</comment>


Only 7% of Office Workers Are Productive - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/brian-de-haaff/only-7-of-office-workers-are-productive-but-most-are-miserable.html <comment><USER2> The title doesn't match the body: "A FlexJobs survey of 3,100 professionals found that only seven percent reported they were _most_ productive when working in the office."

<comment><USER3> Agreed, awful clickbait.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> woot, I'm in the 7%!</comment>


USPS removes mailboxes in Portland and Eugene, cites 'declining mail volume' - <AUTHOR> https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2020/08/usps-removes-mailboxes-in-portland-and-eugene-cites-declining-mail-volume.html <comment><AUTHOR> The picture that the Oregonian ran with this article is of the characteristic red-and-white outgoing ballot envelopes used in Oregon; I think that we all are thinking not just of mail but of ballots when reading this news.

Don't tell the fascists, but Oregonians have a system of ballot dropoff locations at libraries and other popular locations. [0] contains a listing for Multnomah County (Portland), and there's a bunch of locations for Lane County (Eugene) as well, although they don't have an official website listing. Combined with the generous voting window of several weeks, we should have no problem voting even if we can't use USPS blue boxes for dropoff.

[0] [https://multco.us/dropsites](https://multco.us/dropsites)

<comment><USER2> Why are blue states the only ones worried about implementing successful vote by mail? Almost as if they are concerned with flipping red.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oregon _has had_ voting by mail for decades. We're only worried about being suddenly disenfranchised.

And don't worry, Republican legislators in Oregon can and will throw as many tantrums as they like, as long as they don't interfere with voting.

<comment><USER2> [https://sos.oregon.gov/voting/Pages/drop-box- locator.aspx](https://sos.oregon.gov/voting/Pages/drop-box-locator.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> SF had a temporary removal of boxes for construction and they never came back. They're the new phone booth.

One story I heard is that postal workers hate them because they have to bend over to open them and as these workers are all 50+ that isn't working for them. Plus the city/hood complains about tagging.</comment>


Set text on the web to a baseline grid with Sass and rems - <AUTHOR> https://sassline.com/

<comment><USER2> I feel like I don't understand enough about typography to grok what this is all about. It'd be nice to see really basic primer on the site about what a baseline is and why it's a good thing. Looking at his site and blog, I can sorta "tell" that the typography feels nice. But what exactly is this library actually doing? I'm a software developer who isn't terribly good at front-end stuff or design and I feel like I'm missing out. :)

<comment><USER3> "Vertical Rhythm" => keeping ALL text aligned vertically, regardless of where it is on the page or the element type. All text is anchored to integer multiples of a basic vertical distance unit, which (If I remember correctly) is the distance between the baselines of the smallest font-size that to be used.

"baseline" => The line the text 'sits' on, which defines the "origin" of the letters vertically. (at least in the greater Latin-based family of languages). The lowercase letters generally span the distance (of one "x-height" or "ex" in CSS) between the "baseline" and the "median". Some letters (including most capitals) extend higher to a hight higher than the median, and some letters have "descenders" that extend below the baseline. The point is that the baseline is the fixed point of reference we use when drawing the letters (i.e. cursive handwriting, which usually returns to the baseline between letter.

The idea of using these concepts in page layout is based on the idea that the pattern-matching our brain does to parse our vision is always trying to find signal _everywhere_. Therefor, if we help it a bit by putting _EVERYTHING_ \- as measured from the anchors the brain uses - into a simple pattern, it will be recognized faster. To accomplish this you have make it so interval between the baselines of the normal body-text _continues_ (perhaps as a multiple of that interval) into the h[1-6], li, custom divs, everything. You should be able to lay hypothetical ruled paper over the page and have _all_ the text sit nicely on the paper's lines.

This is kind of hard to do in CSS, as you have use the line- height/margin/padding/border to fill the remainder of the baseline interval height and the current tag's font size. It can get _really_ messy if you have a lot of different tag-to-tag situations or strange margins. There are tools (e.g. SASS/SCSS libraries) to assist, but you really have to include this idea from the beginning of the project or face the possibility of needing "minor corrections" everywhere.

I doubt there is much of a measurable benefit from these techniques - it's not going to make everybody read your pages twice as fast. On the other hand, I would agree with you that it can kind look really nice. Just paying attention to typography and layout _at all_ can make all the difference between a readable page and a noisy mess.

A few pages that describe this in further detail:

[http://24ways.org/2006/compose-to-a-vertical- rhythm](http://24ways.org/2006/compose-to-a-vertical-rhythm)

[http://alistapart.com/article/settingtypeontheweb](http://alistapart.com/article/settingtypeontheweb)

[https://medium.com/written-in-code/aligning-type-to- baseline...](https://medium.com/written-in-code/aligning-type-to-baseline-the- right-way-using-sass-e258fce47a9b)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The page is not very in-depth and the link to a promised blog post does not go to a blog post. Is there something missing?

<comment><USER5> The blog post is here: [https://jakegiltsoff.co.uk/posts/sassline-v2-0](https://jakegiltsoff.co.uk/posts/sassline-v2-0)

Seems the author has a bad redirect mechanism when he redirects from HTTP to HTTPS.</comment></comment>


In China, millions make themselves at home in caves - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-caves-20120318,0,2352472.story <comment><USER2> Just yesterday I happened to watch the first episode of BBC's Wild China. The section on caves goes into this, and among other things shows a small village school built inside a giant cave.

Here's a picture: [http://static.bbc.co.uk/programmeimages/640x360/clip/p009j8q...](http://static.bbc.co.uk/programmeimages/640x360/clip/p009j8qz.jpg)

<comment><USER3> BBC's Wild China series is one of the most awesome documentaries I've ever watched.

Coincidentally, it was the first series I watched when I got my Netflix account :).

<comment><USER2> While we're handing out recommendations, check out of the BBC documentary Human Planet. The name might suggest otherwise, but it breaks out of the increasingly stale Attenborough mold. It's as much anthropology as nature documentary, even more so than Wild China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This used to be common in parts of Europe as well, until not that long ago. There are still inhabited houses set into cliffs in parts of France, e.g. around Chinon (<http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/6368827>), and some in Italy have become tourist destinations (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassi_di_Matera>).

<comment><USER5> Common as well in first-millenium middle-east, as in Petra[0] or Mada'in Saleh[1], and there were quite a few cliff-dwelling people in precolumbian north-america, the most well known probably being the Anasazi which had well- known under-outcropping dwellings (e.g. Cliff Palace) but also actual cave dwellings like Tsankwawi[2] or very-close-to-cave dwellings like the House of Many Windows[3].

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra>

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mada%27in_Saleh>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsankawi>

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:House_of_Many_Windows.JPG>

<comment><USER6> also just dig straight down. [http://www.traveladventures.org/continents/africa/bet- giyorg...](http://www.traveladventures.org/continents/africa/bet-giyorgis- church.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There was a guy on 4chan that went crazy and lived in a hole. Later he moved into a cave. [http://4chanarchive.org/brchive/dspl_thread.php5?thread_id=6...](http://4chanarchive.org/brchive/dspl_thread.php5?thread_id=6938187&x=I+live+in+a+hole)

</comment><comment><USER8> Not all the cave dwellings have nicely bricked exteriors and modern interiors:

[1] [https://secure.flickr.com/photos/sookyeeyap/sets/72157602311...](https://secure.flickr.com/photos/sookyeeyap/sets/72157602311169026/with/1512402593/)

[2] [http://yapsookyee.blogspot.com.au/2008/03/ningxia- part-1-dir...](http://yapsookyee.blogspot.com.au/2008/03/ningxia-part-1-dirt- poor-technology.html)

(Ningxia - Zhangjiashu village, by Sookyee)

The most interesting aspect is how quickly China is changing. Within a single generation, families have moved out of "holes in the mud" to village houses. Satellite TV and mobile phone coverage is also apparently available in Zhangjiashu village (and other similar remote villages).

 _Cave dwellings or yaodong still exist for some poorer families. "I used to live in a cave dwelling when I first got married," said Ma Yan's mother, Bai Juhua. "Very few people live in one of those anymore. Recently, a few of them collapsed because of the rain. Thank goodness nobody was hurt."_

...

 _They may not have drinking water, no proper toilet, no food…but they will definitely have mobile phones and satellite dishes for their TV._

</comment><comment><USER9> The exterior: <http://i.imgur.com/2x7b4.jpg>

<comment><USER10> Where is this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Still common in Coober Pedy [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coober_Pedy,_South_Australia#Ov...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coober_Pedy,_South_Australia#Overview)

</comment><comment><USER12> I would wonder a lot about air quality – radon accumulation or other local equivalents. Might not be worse than fumes and wear traces from other modern building materials, though.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting article. I wasn't aware people still lived in caves... shows how much I don't know about the world.

<comment><USER14> Actually, the cave you saw is very near my hometown, it is not that bad. The ventilation in it is good, and currently we have modern household electrical appliances as well.

Lots of local people adopted all things that exists in normal buildings, such as TV cable, Internet access, cars parked their own in the yard, etc.

You can refer to photoes at [http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g528735-d1307902-Rev...](http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g528735-d1307902-Reviews- Yang_Jia_Ling_Cave_Hotel-Yan_an_Shaanxi.html)</comment></comment>


Ridiculously Simple React.js Forms – Without Flux, ES6, JSX, Libraries - <AUTHOR> http://jamesknelson.com/learn-raw-react-ridiculously-simple-forms/ <comment><USER2> All of the examples past the first one are broken in Firefox. Also this seems like overkill, why introduce React when you could do the same thing with just the DOM API, with less overhead? And you get to learn about the underlying standard instead of vendor lock-in library. 177 lines for rather trivial DOM manipulation is too much.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for letting me know about the broken Firefox examples! They should be fixed now.

I agree, you'd never want to actually build something this small with React - Vanilla DOM manipulation would make a lot more sense. That said, React does make sense for larger applications - and my intention is to write a series which will take you from not knowing React to being able to use it for an appropriately sized app. This is just part of the road there :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like this article. I started with React last month, and navigating through the jungle of related technologies (Flux, Redux, Webpack, JSX, Typescript,...) is a real challenge. Most examples use one or several of these, which clouds the understanding. I like it how the author brings it back to basics.</comment>


Evidence-Based Guidelines for Writing Questions on Stack Overflow - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.04692 <comment><USER3> My main encounters with SO are top google results that point to questions they closed or complained about as somehow inadequate.

I love that the questions are not "good enough" for the community, but still good enough to milk for search placement.

It's a useful place, but I have to wonder if its main purpose was to suck up all the available SEO oxygen and concentrate it. I think they even still nofollow the highly relevant links to other sites, because not doing so would dilute their position as the relevant result for virtually any programming query.

EDIT: After a few seconds of googling, it looks like there has been effort on the nofollow front since I last checked. That's cool. I can see that it's nuanced. Still, my current experience with arriving at a "bad" question with great SEO is super frequent

<comment><USER4> Or google results that point to unanswered questions or questions with answers that are years out of date. I think of it as Answer Roulette.

<comment><USER5> And the unanswered question is either locked or I can't post an answer because I don't have enough points.

Stack Overflow is aging pretty poorly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've seen my share of downvoted and closed questions from others, and often it comes down to users expecting the site to adapt to their needs rather than realizing they are a guest on someone else's site. SO doesn't exist to be your personal support site where others are obligated to help you on your terms.

When you're a guest, you follow their rules. And their rules are fairly simple:

\- Stay on topic

\- Don't duplicate existing questions (look before you ask)

\- Ask a specific question ("how do I fix it?" is not a specific question)

\- Be polite (no one is getting paid to answer your question)

\- Don't be a spammer (and avoid looking like a spammer)

With coding questions, it really helps to:

\- Reduce the problem to a specific detail and be concise, if I haven't finished reading the question and have an idea of the answer in 30 seconds, I move on.

\- Provide enough detail that someone else could reproduce your issue. So many people assume I have remote access to their laptop, not to mention what they are thinking inside their head.

\- Write it in English, with punctuation, and capitalization. If there's a 10 line block of text without a single capital letter or period, I move on. Same goes for anyone with their capslock key stuck in the on position. I try my best to understand non-native English speakers, because I sure can't talk in their language, but sadly when there's a language barrier, I move on fairly quickly.

<comment><USER7> I understand that SO's rules prohibit "what is the best tool for this job?" type questions.

Yet, a closed SO question is almost always the first Google result.

What is the correct place to find this type of info?

<comment><USER8> I agree it is stupid. There are other stack exchange sites but it takes about 5 minutes to read through their FAQs to work out where to go - <USER2> Enginering? Superuser? Nope you need Software Recommendations. Obviously. A tiny meta-site where nobody will ever see your question.

Why do they need to separate clearly popular and related questions onto a graveyard site? Sure they might go stale quicker, but I have a load of questions and answers from Android 2ish that are totally irrelevant now and they are allowed to stay apparently.

Stack overflow doesn't have any solution for any answers going stale so I don't think they should use that as a reason to pick on questions that pretty much everyone except the pedantic editors think are fine.

<comment><USER7> Thank you IshKebab, [https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/](https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/) is the answer I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There was a time in my life, and that time is still persistent even now, when every question that I asked on SO was flagged, and I was banned for 7 days with a message which said something like this - "It seems your basic concepts are unclear. Kindly revise then and get back to us"

I swear to God I was so pissed off. Here I am , genuinely asking for help, and then these tech oligarch's were blocking me sitting in their ivory towers.

Hope this paper helps me out!

<comment><USER10> Flagged as duplicate.

Hasn't happened to me, but nothing is more frustrating that having someone else ask my exact question then it gets flagged.

<comment><USER11> I often reach assumed duplicates via Google but still get very insightful answers. If I click on the link pointing towards the assumed original, it's sometimes completely deserted with a single two-line answer that's been outdated for three years.

<comment><USER3> And they're happy to leave the duplicate up for the inbound google benefits it provides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> a mod can close find support in the SO guidelines to close any question they wish.

a tightly defined, clearly written question with a single correct anwswer?

Rejected: RTFM

a question with more than one correct answer (but which almost certainly has a "best answer" which a community like SO is in the obvious best position to judge)?

Rejected: subjective; opinion-based

no axe to grind here--i used to participate in SO (50K rep, and one of the highest rep-to-post ratios)--i honestly just find it too difficult to navigate that narrow straight

<comment><USER13> I find SO is a great place to find answers, a really bad place to ask questions.

there are people (such as the comments above) get judgmental just because a post didn't use capitalization. sure, nobody is getting paid to answer them (well SO kinda is), but there is no reason to berate people for asking questions and missing minor details. just move on.

<comment><USER5> Also, a really bad place to write answers.

<comment><USER13> why is that?

<comment><USER5> Because the question is closed. Or it's open but you don't have enough reputation to answer to something that already has an answer.

Or you replied and your answer got deleted for being a duplicate. It was not a duplicate, it was the solution in python3 while the existing solution is python2.

edit: Just remember another one. That horrible time when I couldn't post the reply the OP was looking for, because the answer had to be at least 100 or 200 characters and the solution wasn't that long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> SO moderation is often finicky and sometimes absurd. Somewhat recently, there was a Q which was closed as unclear _after_ I posted a reply & the OP marked it as accepted. The Q had enough context for someone who knew the app concerned (ffmpeg).

But yeah, in the tags I stick to, many Qs are incomplete. A bespoke template or "wizard" triggered by the selection of a tag would go a long way.

But neither this nor the tips in the paper solve the issue of how to draw attention (and answers) to a Q with high-volume tags.

<comment> mark-r When a question is closed only a single reason is given, even though each vote may have used a different reason. It's not always informative.

<comment><USER14> I assume that the displayed reason is of either the latest vote or a plurality of them. Absurd either way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The problem with SO isn't overly zealous moderation, it's that the self- moderation aspect is so poor. I've often wondered if the former is an indirect product of the latter.

If you don't know the answer to a question then anything that works is great, regardless of how good it actually is (or how relevant it is X years later).

I'm also convinced a huge number of ARBITRARY_PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE SO contributors are just random students googling the answers for sweet, sweet internet points (if I was being generous, to build themselves a 'profile' for job hunting or something) but that is another thing entirely.

<comment> mark-r I've gone to Google for answers quite a few times, but only because I'm truly interested in the question and/or answer. Internet points don't motivate me, being helpful does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Meanwhile... trying to fix a typo in a popular answer.

Can't submit because an edit has to be at least n character changes.

<comment> mark-r There are a lot of arbitrary rules baked into the code to theoretically improve the quality, as the original designers (particularly Jeff Atwood) believed that overall site quality was crucial to the long-term viability of the site. Unfortunately there's a lot of collateral damage.

<comment><USER5> It seems to me that most rules will stop applying after some amounts of points. The founders and early users are never subjected to them, while it's a major hassle for everyone else.

<comment> mark-r Not always true, I have every privilege available on the site and I still ran into the minimum number of changes for an edit. I spent far too much time looking for innocuous changes just so I could push an essential edit through. I don't deny that some rules are like that though.

<comment><USER5> Another example on edits then, you must be familiar with the "edit queue is full" bug? You can clean the edit queue if you have enough points.

<comment> mark-r If you have enough points your edits don't even enter the queue, they're applied immediately.

<comment><USER5> Wow. Privileges in action.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> To be brutally honest this is absolutely pointless.

It is basically confirming simple online etiquette produces best results.

<comment><USER17> Even common sense needs to be studied; some of it occasionally turns out to be wrong.

<comment><USER18> If this paper had implied that common sense was wrong here, would you have trusted it?

<comment><USER17> I don't particularly trust this study; I haven't even read it. I'm just saying that you can't skip studying something just because it seems like common sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> TLDR: Be concise & unemotional.</comment>


Mind Body Problems - <AUTHOR> https://mindbodyproblems.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> The author discusses his work with Russ on this week's EconTalk: [http://www.econtalk.org/john-horgan-on-mind-body- problems](http://www.econtalk.org/john-horgan-on-mind-body-problems)</comment>


Unicorns - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2015/unicorns/ <comment><USER2> Everybody who reads HN should pay Ben Thompson $10/mo for his Daily Update (this is the once-a-week public version). The man's writing has unequivocally had a major impact on my ability to think about technology, and is the only email I read before coffee in the morning.

</comment><comment><USER3> > It turns out winner-take-all doesn't apply just to [...]

I'd like to see someone knowledgeable look at Vilfredo Pareto's 80-20 ratio and do a modern update.

Did anyone do it sort of recently?

</comment><comment><USER4> This was a tough read. I find it hard to read through stuff just throwing quotes, graphs and all into a big mess. Seems like the consistency just takes a dive.</comment>


French court backs mass surveillance - <AUTHOR> https://euobserver.com/justice/129760 <comment><USER2> After holland comes france. Where should i put my servers ?</comment>


The Spy Factory - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/spy-factory.html

<comment><USER2> Country restricted. YouTube mirror [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdPpdu8OGDQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdPpdu8OGDQ)

</comment><comment><USER3> What a coincidence... last night, I pulled up the NOVA site on my TV-connected PC and watched this episode. I had seen it before, and I was racking my brain trying to remember the name of it, until finally discovering it on the Wikipedia page about Room 641A.

It was the bit about the Asia traffic reaching US landfall at Morro Bay and going to the San Luis Obispo data center before routing up to San Francisco that had made me remember the episode years later, just because I have a personal love with that area of the CA coast.

</comment><comment><USER4> Note: February 03, 2009

<comment><USER5> I know, just imagine the capabilities NOW!

(disclaimer : I know that isn't what you meant.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Watch 'Inside the NSA' first, since it goes into the history:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAPh5Pe1Iwk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAPh5Pe1Iwk)

If you watch them in sequence it is almost a continuous timeline.

</comment><comment><USER7> One of the whistleblowers at the end says she was listening to the content of the phone calls, too (from Americans). I hope nobody actually believed Obama when he said the phone calls are not listened to.

Clearly they take video-calls fully from the web, and chats, and e-mails. What would make phone calls so different if they already do that? Plus, he's hidden most of this so far, and who knows what else they aren't telling us (such as the fact that they are actually listening to phone calls from Americans).

That "analyst" that has all the data in front of him should be able to do whatever he wants with the data. There may be rules to not do that, but who's actually verifying it?</comment>


Apollo 11 Flight Plan – Final [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11fltpln_final_reformat.pdf <comment><USER2> This is amazing. Even more amazing that all of this was done in 1969.

How is this PDF entirely high-resolution and vector? Is it essentially a digital remake of the original document? Or was the original document written in some crazy precursor to PostScript?

<comment><USER3> I'd guess it's a remake just based on the fact that the filename has "reformat" in it, and common sense

<comment><USER4> Here's the original in scanned PDF format amongst with some other versions:

[https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11-fltplan.htm](https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11-fltplan.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're going to use a typewriter font to imitate a typewriter, _turn off ligatures_. Aargh.

That said, a "digitally remastered" version is a good idea and a lot of work. Thanks to whoever did it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Pretty thorough document for a basement hoax. I'm kidding :) I'd like to see us go back. It's time for a moon base.

<comment><USER7> Speaking of a moon Base, ESA has a plan establish one. They are planning to send two rovers that will be able to 3d print a base for humans.

They are planning to send two rovers and an inflatable capsule. The inflatable capsule will work as a scaffolding for the rovers to print on. Two rovers will gather moon regolith around the inflated structure to create a protective shell, and their planned lunar base will be able to house 4 people.

It's fascinating!

Source : [http://www.esa.int/spaceinvideos/Videos/2014/11/3D-printing_...](http://www.esa.int/spaceinvideos/Videos/2014/11/3D-printing_a_lunar_base)

<comment><USER8> Oh wow that is awesome, very Shire-esque

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know MET is mission elapsed time, but does anyone know what GET is? (It's pretty much impossible to google, even trying to force google to include it capitalised doesn't help.)

Edit: Somehow missed the glossary on page 3, all in there. :)

<comment><USER10> And by 3 you meant iii, or 13 of the pdf, but actually iv/14 for GET, which is Ground Elapsed Time.

You can't just not define it in your edit without making others (just me?) curious and then mildly annoyed when it isn't on 'page 3'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> On the pages 19-20, what does USB (communication between the lander and the shuttle) stand for? Universal Serial Bus ?

<comment><USER12> Unified S-band ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_S- band](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_S-band)) its a system for tracking the craft and communicating with it.

<comment><USER13> (Sorry, didn't mean to downmod, arrows are too small...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is like discovering a pharaoh's tomb for data viz. There's several really nice ones in here.

</comment><comment><USER15> I find this fascinating. Again 1969!

Abbreviations: 8-balls - Flight Director Attitude Indicator

</comment><comment><USER16> Unassuming yet momentous line item on page 1-2:(j) EVA for 2 hours 40 minutes</comment>


Blackberry App for Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://blackberryhackernews.com

<comment><USER2> The fact that the file is HackersNews.jad instead of HackerNews.jad will lead to a lot of typos if people don't click the link (clicking it didn't work for me).

Why a Rubiks cube instead of an orange HN or something?

My Curve threw the Index 0 >= 0 error, I guess I'll have to "contact my mobile service provider to get my latest APN settings." Though I don't know why.

<comment><AUTHOR> you should be able to find the APN for your carrier online if you search for it. I didnt want to get into any copyright issues, hence the Rubiks cube and not their logo.

p.s. clicking it works now...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Good stuff. Throw some screenshots in! Non BB user but would love to see em!

</comment><comment><USER4> Can't believe there isn't one for BB already. Good Job!

</comment><comment><USER5> bb user's finally getting some love!</comment>


Female Founders Have Brought in Just 2.2% of US VC Again This Year - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/04/female-founders-have-brought-in-just-2-2-of-us-vc-this-year-yes-again/ <comment><USER2> I'd really like to discuss % of female founders looking for VC funds. Also, let's break it down between Angel & VC.

For example, if I have 100 startups founded by men and 100 startups founded by women, what percent of the male-founded startups are raising money versus the percent of female-founded startups (within that 100) are raising money?

Also, if we have 500 startups raising money, how many of those are female founded? That makes a difference in the power of "just 2.2%."

Finally, I hate that this number gets tossed around, conflating the difference between angel/private investor money versus VC/institutional investor money.

How many women successfully raise an angel round but never go on to look for institutional financing?

There's got to be some behavioral research that explains this beyond "investors are misogynistic" which is how these stats get interpreted every time.</comment>


Ask HN: Just survived cancer, but now disabled, need advice - <AUTHOR> Hello guys,
I in my early 30s, spent 10 years building a career around my small video production company. Just found out I had cancer in May, and spent the whole summer in hospital, went through 2 surgeries and radiotherapy. Luckily I'm fine now, but due to the surgery my right hand is now disabled. I can't work in video production anymore, and frankly I'm depressed and feeling useless.
I just want to ask what I should do now. I'm weaker now but I can still use computer with my left hand. I'm not asking for a money making method to get rich, just something to make me feel useful and help pay the bills. (All my savings are spent on the surgeries).
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Hi, which OS are you on? My free project [https://talonvoice.com](https://talonvoice.com) combines speech recognition, eye tracking, and other novel methods to completely replace keyboard/mouse input for people with hand or other injuries (Windows and Linux support are in beta)

I've struggled with hand injuries myself. If you are patient and willing to do some calls / screen sharing and work with me, I'm happy to spend some of my free time with you to see if we can build a workflow for you that enables you to be productive with only one hand.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks but I can still use computer just fine, a tad slower but ok.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have you thought of Teaching? You could contact schools and orgs that run training/workshops etc and see what full time/part time options are available that suit you. Some of them might have experience with this stuff and might point you in the right direction eg - [https://www.inclusionfilms.com](https://www.inclusionfilms.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I've thought about teaching too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you enjoyed video production could you use technology to keep working in video production?

Custom foot pedals, voice to text, mouse with left hand.

Here's a thread on setting up pedals for keyboard input. [https://www.reddit.com/r/PUBATTLEGROUNDS/comments/9q4rph/hea...](https://www.reddit.com/r/PUBATTLEGROUNDS/comments/9q4rph/heavy_duty_leaning_pedals/)

Glad to hear you are fine now. That's the important thing.

<comment><USER5> Agree op should look into this. I've had RSI-ish problems and mouse with my non dominant hand was not too hard to learn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Have you considered an apprenticeship? I'm sure it isn't ideal for someone who seems to have a lot of drive and probably is use to handling every detail. But, if you can get a recent grad or promising young family-member/friend to join you, there may be ways to adapt. You could step back and focus on clientele and the big picture in addition to fostering someone else.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm quitting video production for a change, also harder to cope with deadlines/ stress from work now.

<comment><USER4> You might find this podcast interesting.

StartupsForTheRestOfUs.com

If you're still interested in doing your own thing, maybe something new with less deadlines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Make a YouTube channel that authentically documents your day to day life.

Your audience would be other people in a similar situation.

Communicate stuff of interest to your audience, get a slab of money from google.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thinking about that too. Maybe can help inspire others with similar situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If left hand works well you'll adapt! If it's a bit weak there are some helpers possible.

For fun I changed my keyboard layout to something exotic and felt really handicapped at first (totally self inflicted, and not comparable at all to what you go through mentally). It's OKish after a month, and now I type faster than I ever typed on qwerty.

 _Mouse_ :

I think with 30 your brain will adapt very well to your left hand. If it's too weak maybe the fingers can do more work so a trackball or something could work. The switch to the left hand is a brainfuck anyways so it doesn't matter if you also change the device, just settle on one quickly.

If hand/arm are alright, but fingers weak: click with something else (e.g. your foot). I can research or build hardware for that. (cheapest solution: remove all but one key from a keyboard and use a tool to map that key to click)

 _Keyboard_ :

The most common fix I think is having a modifier to "mirror" the keyboard. E.g. when you hold space and press a button on the left side of the keyboard it will register the key that is on the right side of the keyboard. There is scripts for this readily available, just let me know if mac or PC and I can find one for you (or you google).

 _Editing_ :

For editing you'll need shortcuts. You could either try to change them or find a mouse that has a few more programmable buttons. If neither works you can probably script something.

If everything fails I'll build you bunch of stomp-pedals for the feet that register as a keyboard (like guitarists have; just for shortcuts, not for typing).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'm used to typing and clicking with my left hand now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Read the story of Rick Allen. He is the drummer for Def Leppard, one of the biggest rock groups in the world at one time. He lost his arm in a car accident and learned to play drums with one arm and a modified drum kit.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Allen_(drummer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Allen_\(drummer\))

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You have your left hand free. It's a tough situation and I'm very sorry you are going through this. I would suggest learning to use the computer with your left hand, things will click (excuse the pun), faster than you think. Good luck to you man, wish you the best. What is the name of your company if I ever need video production?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'm used to doing things with my left hand now. Due to stress from the work I plan to sell the company to one of my employees and do something new for a change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> List of Remote Jobs or Gigs Platforms

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JfNAbUX_lN9K3MCNHO15...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JfNAbUX_lN9K3MCNHO15GJtJ5qpk7H9Cl3xTBwv2FR8/htmlview)

Potentially of interest:

[http://writepay.blogspot.com](http://writepay.blogspot.com)

r/gigworks

r/workingonline

r/freelance

</comment><comment><USER12> Tutoring. Put out flyers / ads for people to come to you and pay $100/hr or whatever to learn the tools and workflow necessary for them to become their own utube star.

It's trite, but I'll say it anyway: dont focus on the things you cant do, focus on the things you can. That can include "working out how to do the old things again now that its harder".

Good luck

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I like to think like I'm playing a game in harder difficult haha

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You probably have already checked out some ambidextrous mice, but FWIW, this is the left handed mouse I use: Elecom M-XT4DRBK

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I still use my old mouse, just swap the buttons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> First wait to gain your strength back, it will come back soon. Then think of your alternatives. You could eventually go back to your old self but you have the opportunity to leverage this experience in your future decisions. They say for a reason "what doesn't kill makes one stronger" for a reason. Wish you the best!!!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I'm trying to leverage this situation too. Maybe it's a turning point for something better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> On the bright side, it will be easy for you to jump the line for Superhuman email if you hit them up.

</comment><comment><USER16> You could hire interns/apprentices to click and type for you, some coders do this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can manage to use the computer, just find it hard to cope with the stress</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How is FB Messenger on ios in terms of privacy? - <AUTHOR> I recently switched to an iphone from an android. Up until this point, I've avoided downloading Messenger because my old android phone was running an outdated version of android and didn't come with privacy guards. I now have an iphone SE, and I was curious after reading all the articles about the pro-privacy stance on the iphones, will ios provide safeguards against messenger doing shady things, like:<p>- Secretly opening the mic to listen in on conversations<p>- Block Messenger from accessing phone contacts, call history, and text messages<p>- Block Messenger from accessing my phone number, so that other people can't auto-sync me on their phone using their contacts list.<p>And any other sorts of weird things? A lot of my friends only use facebook, so I'm still tied to it. I also don't want to use a browser on the phone, because that is super clunky, so I'm thinking of using the native app. I tried looking for an open source privacy-friendly version for ios, but they are nonexistent. <comment><USER2> The platform itself is super insecure (this is my opinion and I understand it may be untrue) but if you're on the newest version of iOS Apple has had a reliable track record of protecting users' data. I would put Messenger on my iPhone if I had one.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have 12.0.1 installed, I didn't see any privacy related description in the info area.</comment></comment>


Twitter Reports Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2014 Results - <AUTHOR> https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=894844 <comment><AUTHOR> Gosh, I love Twitter as a company and product... but its financials make me cringe.

The adjusted EBITDA feels like a totally made up number by adjusting R&D and god knows what else... and I would like to be the judge of R&D, because that label is a black whole, and at $690m a year, this is no joke.

Then, onto the important number: cash from operating activities is $82m in 2014. That means Twitter is trading +300x EV/OCF, with a rapidly decelerating top line growth. I want to cry.

<comment><USER2> I agree, but somehow the stock jumps over 9% in after-hours trading.

<comment><AUTHOR> that to me is an irrational market, because the analyst expectations was based on what exactly? i will use the product, i won't invest in the company.</comment></comment></comment>


Quora has become more "question centric" than "answer centric" these days - <AUTHOR> It seems everyone is hell bent on asking others questions, I'm getting questions at the rate of like handfuls per hour!
And yet, not a soul seems to be reading the answers that I post to them (based on the views and upvotes I'm getting on the answers I've posted).
Does it have anything to do with their new policy of rewarding some chosen quorans depending on how many questions they ask as I've heard? <comment><USER3> Many people are using Quora to market their product. The pattern I have seen is they ask a question that they want to appear for in Google (other search engines), and then they answer the questions plugging in their product.

Suitable for the company but bad for the platform.

<comment><USER4> Yup. Quora is basically a spam-magnet. I don't even click links that point there these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Quora ceased to be useful about 2 years ago. I am surprised no other startups have tried to get into that space - it seems ripe for a new, fresh, clean approach.

<comment><USER6> There's not that much money to be made and the competition (Stack Exchange) is strong.

In fact the reason Quora turned bad is because there isn't much money to be made and they're being desperate, sacrificing quality in exchange for content to attract page views.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Quora as others have mentioned is useless. Stick with subreddits or niche forums. I think anyone that markets themselves as a Q&A site will have this issue of attracting spammers.

</comment><comment><USER8> At this point it's really only a cesspool of people trying to sell stuff - <USER2> off the platform, you won't be missing out on anything valuable.</comment>


Show HN: ➿ All Unicode code points in GNU pixel font〘3mb, ☞⥮-able, 🔭-able 〙⍾༕☥ - <AUTHOR> http://point2625.appspot.com/hn

<comment><AUTHOR> All 196607 code points in assigned regions. First time you'll have to wait for the font to load. Tested on Chrome, Safari and Firefox on Mac and iOS. The pixel font is "Unifont."

Related:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Unifont](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Unifont)

[http://www.unicodemap.org/](http://www.unicodemap.org/)

[http://unicode-table.com/](http://unicode-table.com/)

[http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html](http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html)

<comment><USER2> in firefox 36, i get: TypeError: can't convert undefined to object @ 122:14

<comment><AUTHOR> I found the error (moz stlylesheet object has cssRules not rules) and made it work. Also made the custom styling of input work in Firefox now. Thanks for pointing this out! Hope you can see it now.

<comment><USER2> awesome, it works and looks good.

i love gnu unifont too and made a renderer[1], using a big spritesheet[2] rather than a proper font file. using an image seems like a good way to load unifont in terms of bandwidth, but of course the downside is losing the ability to treat it as real text.

[1] try typing into [http://bon.gs/pxt/test.html](http://bon.gs/pxt/test.html) (i haven't marked all the half-width chars yet so the spacing is off for a bunch)

[2] [http://i.imgur.com/kiVf8Hm.png](http://i.imgur.com/kiVf8Hm.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> AH! That's cool. You made a font renderer using an image. An interesting idea. I could use that to maybe reduce the download time, as the font is 3mb and your image of plane 0 is 850k. If all of plane 0 can fit in an 850k png, maybe it would be possible to do a custom compressed format for Unifont (that could still be scaled and colored), that beat out the WOFF file's 3mb. Thanks for sharing that!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Orac – Filter news from social media using AI - <AUTHOR> https://app.orac.ai/ <comment><AUTHOR> Developer here. Like a lot of programmers, I struggle with distraction, and I get frustrated with time wasted on addictive social media. I also feel frustrated by the lack of control I have over the algorithms that control what I see on social media, and the constant tracking and privacy invasion.

So I've been working on Orac as a way to get interesting and useful content that matters from social media, without losing focus. It's currently an early preview version. The front end is built as a web app with React and GraphQL, and it uses deep learning to rank quality and predict attributes about stories it finds shared on social media (such as seriousness, objectivity, political stance etc). The back end is AWS Kinesis for stream ingestion, Lamda for running inference, and DynamoDB and ElasticSearch, along with AWS AppSync.

While it's experimental, the content predictions are already pretty interesting, and it has a bunch of pre-built filters as a way to play around with them - such as moods, personas and filter bubbles.

Would love to know what folks think and if this is something useful to people that's worth pursuing!

<comment><USER3> Is this branding related to Blake's 7?

<comment><USER4> Probably not. The author seems american; The site has a very US news bias, and only has US politics filtering.

Which is a shame. I hope the author plans to expand it to have a more global viewpoint.

For those that don't know - 'Blake's 7' was a 1970s UK sci-fi TV show that had a portable 'super-computer' called Orac, whose personality was arrogant and aloof. The show was set in a dystopian future where a despised militarised government rules the galaxy. Still worth watching even now to be honest.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd commented above that the current feed is intended for testing, but that the plan is for you to add your own social feeds and news sources, and that it will then skew similar in finding additional sources.

The "filter bubbles" are also intended as a couple of examples, so initially I've used US ones.

I'm Australian and while I'm based in the US, one of the problems Orac is trying to solve is localisation. Orac is running geo and locale predictions on content, but they aren't very good so far, so I haven't included them in the UI or filtering yet. But a few folks who I've shown have said that it would be useful to filter content that's relevant by location, so that is definitely in the roadmap!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So I've been thinking about this a little bit and I'm not sure if I'm the outlier here but when I really want to focus on something, I'll turn off social media completely. The medium is the distraction in itself, no matter who I follow. With that being said, I think that this tech has a ton of potential.

One use case off the top of my head would be for fantasy football. I'd love to see some sort of mode where I can get high quality news for my chosen few players or teams. I run into an issue right now where there's a ton of noise around "is this player injured or not" and it'd be great to have some sort of AI that could do a better job than I can in filtering what's fake or not.

Plenty of other interesting use cases for this tech, this is just one that jumps out for me!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Your feedback is similar to a lot of the feedback I've received from friends I've shown it to, so I don't think you're an outlier at all.

I think most people do something similar to you, and block themselves from social media. I know I do. People resort to deleting their accounts, temporarily blocking access using browser extensions, or removing the apps completely. The problem I've found is that there is interesting work-related content that I do want to know about that gets shared through social media (and even more messaging). And I get work messages through facebook and twitter, and then half my day is blown. I think that's worse for people on a maker's schedule. You need the important content (say new deep learning research) but you blink and you've shot half a day after glancing at facebook. The direction I'm heading with Orac is to use the topic modelling and a doc2vec approach to match up clusters of concepts between content, and your todo list. That's still a way off but this is intended to be a step in that direction.

The deep learning models are still in progress, but they're already getting pretty good at ranking content and identifying topics etc. One friend described them as "scary" and I don't think they are quite there but they are improving.

Adding "build your own" filters is definitely on the road map - so something like the fantasy football tracking is a great use of that!

<comment><USER5> I didn't think about it that way but you're totally right! The reason I don't open up social media right now is because I know there's going to be garbage there that distracts me. If I could open Orac up and it would block anything that it deemed as distracting then I don't see a reason why I wouldn't use it.

I really look forward to seeing what becomes of this!!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thank you - yes that's a key driver. You don't want to have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak :)

There is incredibly useful and inspiring content out there on social media. I just don't want to have to trawl through a cesspool of crap to find the nuggets of usefulness buried in it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Blake's Seven? [0]

0: [http://blakes7.wikia.com/wiki/Orac](http://blakes7.wikia.com/wiki/Orac)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well picked! :)

Another Terry Nation fan I'm guessing.

There's a feature being worked on that is some way down the track, but will make sense of the name. If you'll forgive the teaser, but it's related to having conversational control.

<comment><USER6> I was a child when it was first broadcast and I loved it. It was the inspiration for many a childhood game. We always used to argue about who was going to be who - everyone wanted to be Blake, no-one wanted to be Servalan.

I think I recall trying to make Orac out of a shoe box and felt tip pens!

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been planning to make an Orac from a perspex case using a Raspberry Pi with some speakers and a camera (and a lot of pretend wiring). But haven't had chance to get further than some rough plans :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, one angle I'm interested in is the surfacing of new sources of good information. For example, many popular sites are basically just aggregators of content from other sources, with perhaps a little light commentary on top.

Many years ago, I might have gone to Slashdot for the commentary from the site members, but that devolved into a festering sewage pit a long time ago. But slashdot does still sometimes link to good articles -- you just have to ignore all the commentary on the site.

So, how do you keep discovering good sources of content and feeding them into the system? If I wanted to feed a bunch of sites into the system and let you do the work of filtering them for me, how would I go about that?

Another angle I'm interested in is the deduplication of content, and hoisting the value of the earlier posts over the later ones that are just regurgitating what some other site said? And related to that, how do you surface newer posts that are actually an update to the older article, with new information?

Any thoughts or observations you can share?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you'll like some of the ideas we're working on.

For this preview release, you can't control the sources. But when it gets released for real, you will be able to create an account an add your own social accounts (twitter, facebook, linkedin, reddit) to monitor, and also add your own news sources (RSS feeds, websites to spider etc).

Based on the sources you add, Orac will then try to find other interesting similar sources for content to include in the feed.

On the back-end, we're basically building a database of media content with quality and attribute predictions designed for searching and filtering based on topic model matching.

There are some interesting ideas we're working on with de-duplication (establishing canonical sources, effectively). But that's super early.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great stuff Jed. Have had a play with the latest preview and like it a lot. Also starting to get a better sense of how you could apply Orac in an organisational context and look forward to discussing next time we catch up. Cheers, Dave

<comment><USER8> PS: I can see a couple of use cases for it - e.g. teams working on projects or tracking media coverage of specific issues. [Disclaimer - I know Jed]

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great concept. Would you be able to share how you would be able to filter based on mood, personas, etc?

I can think of a few commercial use cases where this could be incredibly useful but would likely based on the methodology you've used. Guess I'm interested in how do you define quality and what attributes are you predicting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Under the hood, there are about 80 different predictions or scoring attributes being run. A lot of those are deep learning models.

A mood or a persona is really an algorithm representing a batch of those. A lot of them you can get pretty close to just by using the Power Filter directly. But there is some secret sauce.

But broadly speaking, you can think of a Hacker persona as being someone interested in Science and Tech and Education as key broad topic areas, wanting more serious content, and wanting content from credible science-based sources. They prioritise useful content, with more in-depth coverage.

An Activist might be someone with a center-left to left stance, interested in social fields, politics and psychology, but also influenced by trends and what is currently generating a lot of "heat".

If you have representations of what good quality content "within that community of personas" looks like, then you can train models and test scoring systems that try to capture them.

Content quality is a big topic. But our working thesis is that there are canonical examples with domains of expertise of what great content looks like - PG's essays, Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalism, award winning research papers. And there are similar examples of what very bad content looks like - hate speech, extremism etc.

So that's been the broad basis for the models that underly the predictions.

[edits for typos]

<comment><USER10> Just wondering if you could provide more details on your model like do you use a CNN or an LSTM? Is there a paper you have written about it? Also how do you get the data for training your models? Also do you do any retraining as new data comes in? Do you also have some groundtruth to measure the performance of your models?

<comment><USER11> I just noticed your post ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18050422](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18050422)) about courses but cannot comment on it because it is too old. I am an employer with strong opinions. If you'd like to hear them please e-mail me here: [https://www.idtechex.com/contact/team/dr_jon_harrop.asp](https://www.idtechex.com/contact/team/dr_jon_harrop.asp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How can I get in touch with you please? I'd love to plug this into what I'm doing, there is a lot of synergy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Darren, very happy to chat and find out more about what you're doing. Anyone is welcome to email me about Orac with ideas, feedback etc too - <USER2> [at] orac [dot] ai

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In Power Filter mode, it seems the following knobs are available:

* Overall rating

* Political Stance

* Political Balance

* Seriousness

* Reading Level

* Objective Tone

* Credibility

* Virality and Engagement

* Temperament

How do you measure these objectively?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great question, but it's hard to address in a comment. However, I'll have a go (in brief) :)

There are biases in all algorithms because they represent an encoding of either judgement or bias in training data selection.

So our aim here is to control for bias, and take some steps towards giving the user more control, compared to an approach like Facebook's where the algorithm is entirely a black box.

The approach we've taken is, effectively, to try to codify editorial judgement and professional journalistic best practices into the system, and the selection of training data. As well as being a programmer / computer scientist, I'm also a professionally trained journalist and was editor of Australia's leading computer magazine.

The knobs aren't direct representations of model predictions themselves, but weighted summary scores based on algorithms using a number of lower-level predictions (using statistical models, ML/DL models, ensembles). The personas/moods/filter bubbles use more of the individual attribute predictions.

Having said that, in practice it's all a bit of an experimental mish-mash currently, and we have a lot of work still to do. Some predictions are way more effective than others, as you can see browsing through it. And others (like source and author quality and attribute prediction) are learning and improving over time. But we have a lot of iteration and experimentation ahead of us!

In practice, the initial feedback has been that the predictions are surprisingly good. But sometimes they are way off the mark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hey Jed, cool stuff! What's your vision for the product?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a couple of ideas driving it, but the main one is to use AI (deep learning sequence to sequence models especially) to filter and recommend content to help busy people stay focused on their work.

The background is that social media is making us dumber and less productive.

So I want to make something that lets you focus on your work by finding the best content matching what you're working on or interested in, and presenting it in a distraction-free way.

<comment><USER14> I totally agree.

How do you want to enable the user to use that functionality?

Is it only intended to apply the classification to content that's available throw orac.ai?

What are your thoughts on delivering it as a browser extension and/or api?</comment></comment></comment>


Diet, Dying, Demographics - <AUTHOR> http://unintendedconsequenc.es/diet-dying-and-demographics/ <comment><USER2>
      ...adhering to a Mediterranean diet has been connected to larger brain volume in older adults (see the Rotterdam study...

This is a flat lie. The Mediterranean diet is neither used nor mentioned in the Rotterdam study abstract; instead, Dutch dietary guidelines are the metric for diet quality.</comment>


Tesla Faces U.S. Criminal Probe Over Musk Statements - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-18/tesla-faces-u-s-criminal-probe-over-musk-statements <comment><USER3> The sad piece of karma in all of this is that Musk tweeted in an effort to destroy the shorts.

His tweet turned out to:

\- give the shorts a big dip in his stock,

\- an investigation by the SEC

\- an investigation by the DOJ

\- the backing off of a deep pocketed investor in the Saudis

\- Him potentially being personally liable, which would mean having to step away from SpaceX and Tesla if he was found guilty of fraud.

This could be the biggest thing to come out of all of this. Imagine Elon getting a 2 year ban on begin an executive in a company. Or SpaceX not being able to bid on government contracts because their CEO is a felon.

There is going to be a lot of backroom dealing to do everything they can to prevent Elon from being charged.

\- A lawsuit that is seeking class action status for anyone who was short at the time of his tweet.

\- this is speculation, but it must have really strained his relationship with the board. I mean you can only fight so many battles at once, you'd think you'd want to have the board on your side

All to screw with the shorts, who really have no power what-so ever to hinder Telsa. If he had just not used twitter he and Tesla would be better off and the shorts would be worse off.

<comment><USER4> Please define shorts. Google was unable to figure it out.

<comment><USER5> Short sellers. People who sell something they don't own, speculating that they will be able to buy it later at a lower price.

If so, they make money. If not and the price goes up a bit, some shorts are forced to buy at the higher price to limit their losses. That pushes the price up further, forcing more shorts to buy, etc., causing a "short squeeze" where the price rapidly shoots up very high, "destroying" a lot of shorts.

<comment><USER6> Pedantically shorting doesn't _have_ to be borrowing the underlying instrument. Put options are another way to trade on the idea that a stock will go down. I'd actually bet it's the more common way. It would still be colloquially referred to as being short.

<comment><USER7> That's actually the opposite of "pedantically" given that you're playing loose with the definition. Pedantically, shorting is selling a financial instrument you don't own, with the idea (though it is not a requirement to fit the definition) that you'll give it back later by buying at a price lower than it is now.

What you described is options trading, one method of which hedges against declines in stock price. Yeah, one could take a "short" position by buying puts, but it can be argued that a short position is not what puts were originally designed for. In contrast to short sellers who obviously intend for the price to go down, or they won't make any money.

I do question whether puts are the "more common way" given that they have an expiration. You can hold on to a short sell as long as you can pay the interest and the loaning party doesn't want their shares back.

<comment><USER8> Arguing over the definition of Pedantic. I think we've reached peak HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sometimes its possible to care so much that you lose sight of what is important. This happened to Elon. I think this will be a case study someday about CEO ethics. I found it very interesting that when he was on the Joe Rogan podcast he had so much to say about social media, and none of it was complementary. How he did not see the dichotomy of his twitter use and this situation strikes me as humorous. I feel like Elon needs to find some new handlers and get some team members that can keep him from shooting himself in the foot.

I only recently got back on twitter. I do not use my likeness or use it for any other reason except to find out about things I consume(stand up comedy, concerts, etc). Twitter is a great platform for that. Its an awful platform for speaking your mind when you run a company(or the country)

<comment><USER10> "I'm using social media the right way, the others are doing it wrong and I wish they'd go away". Always the same line of thinking.

<comment><USER11> _" I'm using social media the right way, the others are doing it wrong and I wish they'd go away"_

"We're using our sovereign power and military force the right way. The others are doing it wrong, and we wish they'd go away."

Same old story. In one of Raymond Smullyan's books, there was a story of a word the US codebreakers in WWII couldn't quite translate. In the end, they settled on "pro-Japanese" as a shaky translation. Years later, a retired codebreaker is talking to a retired Japanese soldier, and is told that the code term meant, "sincere."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are a lot of things to respect about Musk.

But he lied on twitter in a direct effort to cause financial harm to people shorting Tesla stock. You can't do that. He should go to jail.

<comment><USER13> This is a massive oversimplification. Musk may be in peril but this is not as cut-and-dried a case of fraud like you make it seem. Consider this recent comment from the SEC:

 _"When you talk about fraud," [Jina Choi of the SEC] answered, "you're talking about a state of mind, you're talking about mens rea. We call it scienter. You have to do something with intentionality. The idea of just making a misstatement doesn't necessarily rise to the level of fraud. "_

 _Misstatements can "be the first step to fraud," Choi had added. "But generally, when we talk about fraud the F word, I think we are talking about a state of mind that's a little bit higher than that."_ [1]

That telegraphs a pretty lenient stance on misstatements that aren't completely fabricated. And there were actual serious negotiations happening here. That's not in dispute.

Without question, Musk made a misstatement. But what was his state of mind? Was there intent to deceive, or was he merely overzealous in his interpretation of the negotiations? If he can argue the latter then it may not rise to the level of criminal fraud.

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/13/a-tesla-investor-says- he-w...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/13/a-tesla-investor-says-he-was- recently-questioned-by-u-s-regulators-about-that-infamous-funding-secured- tweet/)

<comment><USER14> > _That telegraphs a pretty lenient stance on misstatements that aren 't > completely fabricated_

American commercial law goes out of its way to avoid criminalizing stupidity. At a certain level, the difference between a genius and a madman is the genius was correct. They are indifferentiable without the benefit of hindsight.

The nail in Elon's coffin (or lack thereof) will probably revolve around the degree to which he documented his animus towards short sellers in the days leading up to the misstatement.

<comment><USER13> Nah, it's clear Musk hates short sellers. That's not the issue. Nor is his desire to hurt them. The question is whether he had scienter when misstating the finality of the deal he was negotiating.

<comment><USER14> > _That 's not the issue. Nor is his desire to hurt them._

That's a huge issue. If he made his misstatements with the intent of hurting short sellers, that's criminal fraud. If he just made a material misstatement, with no intent to harm anyone, it's a civil case.

<comment><USER13> You inserted "intent". That is the key question, not whether he dislikes short sellers.

Every CEO dislikes short sellers, and nearly every CEO makes "material misstatements" now and then. What separates that from fraud is what the SEC focused on in their comment: scienter.

<comment><USER15> You keep throwing around the word "scienter" without understanding what it is.

Scienter just means intent. It's literally just the fancy legal term for intent.

Thus, it matters very much that Musk has a history of trashing short sellers and wishing harm to them, because they can use that history to establish that his tweet was made with the intent to defraud market participants and materially affect the price of Tesla's stock.

Especially the "funding secured" bit. You don't say "secured" if it's not really secured. There is no legal interpretation where "secured" is a harmless mistake.

<comment><USER13> I have been using scienter and intentionality interchangeably. I think it is you who is throwing around fancy-sounding terms like "legal interpretation" without really knowing what they mean.

Again, every CEO dislikes short sellers and literally everything they do to talk up the company hurts shorts, by definition. You don't need any tweets to establish that. It's a given. And every CEO misstates things and makes errors and in big companies every statement moves the stock price. The issue is intent.

What you are doing is focusing on the misstatement, adding in fancy sounding terms like "legal interpretation", and whipping that up into intent to defraud. But as the SEC _explicitly addressed in the cited comment_ , they set the "state of mind" bar higher than mere misstatements. You are going to need more than that to establish scienter.

Your fancy term aside, there actually are other interpretations of his comment. He may have been overzealous. He may have overestimated his investors intent.

Let's look at it another way. Musk is a reasonably smart guy. How far was he going to get with this alleged scheme to intentionally defraud the market? How long until everyone realized the funds were not actually secured and the fraud was revealed? Like, 2 hours? That would be the stupidest fraud in the history of frauds. The conclusion is that, perhaps he actually believed the deal would come together. Erroneously, but erroneous statements are not enough for fraud; the key factor is state of mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Notably, this now involves the _DOJ_ , not just the SEC.

<comment><USER17> That's likely because the SEC does not have the power to undertake criminal prosecutions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Imagine a private company with ballistic missiles and submarines...

I was musing the other day that Elon Musk may be planning to run for president. Why? Well, if there's one thing that 2016 showed us, it's that the road to the White House runs through snubbing Wall Street, calling the press a bunch of boring liars, accusing your opponents of pedophilia, making bizarre incoherent tweet storms in the middle of the night, and bragging about the size of your rocket.

<comment><USER19> It'd be funny but since he was born in South Africa he's disqualified from running.

<comment><USER20> Ted Cruz was born in Canada. The naturalization requirement is a lot looser than you might think.

<comment><USER21> He was born a US citizen though. The requirement isn't that you are born on US soil, but that you are born a US citizen. John McCain was born in Panama.

<comment><USER22> John McCain's citizenship was more complicated than most people realize. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-born- citizen_clause#Jo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-born- citizen_clause#John_McCain).

<comment><USER23> huh. I never realized this. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm curious - supposing HN had the power to decide, would you replace Elon Musk as CEO of Tesla? What kind of future does the company have without its founder?

Personally, I think I would be much more confident in Tesla, and much more likely to buy a Tesla product, if he were not in charge.

<comment><USER25> No. Use the Apple model. Steve Jobs was needed until the IPhone was really established (not to mention the IPod.) Only then should you bring in a guy like Cook.

<comment><USER26> Completely different scenarios, completely different companies. Steve Jobs was never the technical guy, he was more the visionary. He could get away with that, because he had really smart engineers and producing phones and computers is a lot simpler than producing cars. Elon Musk is a genius, but what does he really know about production or getting the cost down for an electric car more than any other CEO of a major auto company? Elon Musk is a visionary, but a visionary for an auto company is not as vital as a visionary for a tech or computer company. They need a guy in tesla who can increase production and lower cost, or sell at a different price point and change target market for their cars. They don't need someone who is going to tweet out a lot of reckless things while hemorrhaging money for the company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The frequency of these bizarre actions by Musk are going up. Is he seriously just cracking under the pressure of having way too much on his plate? The dude is obviously a genius, but he's turning into a mad genius.

<comment><USER28> Why do people keep calling him a genius? His main distinction is his money and DESIRE to build interesting things. Nowhere is his staggering, extraordinary intelligence evident. I'd love to be demonstrated wrong, but this genius fetishism seems to be harmful with no benefit: the man is running a company. Judge him on how well he does, not how he's so intelligent it's so sad he can't take care of his employees responsibly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can anyone knowledgable of this kind of stuff comment on the likely outcome of the situation and scenarios (without sensationalizing)? If found guilty, not guilty, penalty (jail, fine, other), investigation time, length, impact on other companies like SpaceX, gravity/frequency of the event vs other companies / offenses, etc.?

<comment><USER30> The DOJ couldn't even prosecute any major banks for the fraud that led to the financial collapse in 2008. That is how hard it is to prove criminal intent for white collar crimes.

At best, they settle with Musk for some financial penalty.

</comment></comment><comment> village-idiot Tesla would do a lot better if Elon Musk got a social media manager who can veto his dumbest tweets.

</comment><comment><USER31> Suprising to see here that the majority seem to be anti-Musk. "He's guilty, send him to jail" without allowing evidence to come forward that these statements were false.

>"the matter should be quickly resolved as they review the information they have received."

If anything the public statement says the opposite. I actually believe there may have been some email, or conversations about a buyout of Tesla. Wouldn't be the first time, Google almost bought Tesla in 2008 during the financial crisis.

</comment><comment><USER32> Next the California Highway Patrol will be after him for texting while driving.

Tesla might be better off without Musk. It's past the stage where it needs a visionary. Now it needs someone who can run a big auto manufacturer.

</comment><comment><USER33> A public lesson for future CEOs to just stay the fuck off social media - <USER2> swam far up shit creek purely because of his engagement with Twitter. It's not worth the trouble.

<comment><USER34> I wouldn't be surprised if the Board had (at the least) considered restricting his social media so that his messages require approval from someone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The thing is, now that the DOJ has their foot in the door, they may not stop at the infamous tweet. They're going to look at the books. They're going to be talking to allllll the recent senior executive departures, some of whom ran for the hills within days of taking their jobs.

Who knows what kinds of bugs they'll find when they turn over some rocks?

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm assuming non libel related statements and company related statements only.

</comment><comment><USER37> Note: no criminal probe. This is hyperbole.

Note: Martha Stewart did worse and was only found guilty on the coverup and fraud after the fact.

Note: hit piece by Bloomberg, clearly attempting to manipulate stock price as they have done for years without any prosecution.

</comment><comment><USER29> Another day, another excited slam piece headline against Tesla. Tesla's Nov 7 Earning Report must be good...

In all seriousness, no idea what Elon was thinking with that Tweet.

Gut says, long term Tesla will be fine and little will to come of this investigation.

<comment><USER38> >Gut says, long term Tesla will be fine and little will to come of this investigation.

Or this could be their DeLorean moment. People's guts are notoriously bad at predicting the future.

<comment><USER39> Out of curiosity, what was the DeLorean moment? I know DeLorean didn't succeed in the long term. But what was this "moment" you're talking about? Google gave me nothing.

<comment><USER40> Probably DeLorean's attempt to traffic cocaine in order to keep the company afloat:

> _On October 19, 1982, DeLorean was charged by the U.S. government with > trafficking cocaine following a videotaped sting operation in which he was > recorded by undercover federal agents agreeing to bankroll a cocaine > smuggling operation. The FBI set him up with more than 59 pounds (27 kg) of > cocaine (worth about US$6.5 million) in a hotel near Los Angeles > International Airport after arriving from New York, and the Federal Bureau > of Investigation stated DeLorean was the "financier" to help the financially > declining company in a scheme to sell 220 lb (100 kg), with an estimated > value of US$24 million._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm curious, if you are a long, did you upvote this HN submission?

It would be interesting to see how sentiment like that shaped the ebb and flow of Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER42> first interplanetary flight risk?

</comment><comment><USER43> The headline is almost as long as the article. Useless article.

</comment><comment><USER44> Me

</comment><comment><USER45> unnessercery

</comment><comment><USER46> Good chance that Musk will get placed on the bad actors list and will be unable to serve as an officer or executive of Telsa.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm not sure what he could be _criminally_ charged with - neither he nor anyone else at the company sold stock and profited from his idiotic tweets. I believe you actually need to profit from manipulation in order for it to enter the realm of criminal.

<comment><USER48> They caused damage to short sellers when the stock price rose because of Musk's lie and they had to cover their losses, how is that not criminal? You don't have to personally profit to commit a crime.

<comment><USER47> To my knowledge, and I'm in the industry, that is not a CRIMINAL act

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'm starting to get conspiratorially minded about all of this. It began when I couldn't understand the seeming coordination of the attacks against the Uber CEO. I mean, he seemed like the same kind of garden variety psychopath I expect in the role of CEO - why were there so many hit pieces about him specifically? Now Musk is a new target and somehow everyone is cheering for him to fail.

Seems like if you get into competition with the auto industry or threaten the oil industry by attempting to change consumer behavior then you become a massive target. I actually feel like forces other than public opinion are at work here.

<comment><USER50> especially when the article mentions :p "who were granted anonymity to discuss a confidential criminal probe" press reliability at its finest

<comment><USER51> You think _Bloomberg_ \- of all outlets- is manufacturing sources at the Justice Department?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This time the shorts really have him. Or do they?

It turned out Tesla wasn't killed by not being able to make the model 3 at all, it wasn't on being able to make the model s in larger volumes, it wasn't because there was no demand, that there would be no demand after various incentives around the world went down (still some left in the us, also available to all other car companies by the way), it wasn't because they couldn't make the model 3 in volume, it wasn't because they'd all catch on fire and burn up in accidents, it wasn't because the over-promised-over-named autopilot was dangerous and would kill people, it wasn't because the leaf, the volt, the bolt, the i3, the i8, and continually forthcoming cars from audi, porsche, ford, mercedes, bmw killed them. It wasn't because there was a secret sec investigation was preventing them from refinancing, it wasn't because they have just lied all this time about selling the cars for less than manufacturing cost (separate from their enormous money spent on infrastructure), it wasn't because the batteries would run down and not survive heat, cold, regular driving, daily driving, supercharging.

It was damn stupid for him to make that twitter comment.

<comment><USER53> You may be getting down voted, but you're right that the last several years of fear, uncertainty, and doubt has been shown to have been bullshit in having not panned out.

Meanwhile, the last several years of warnings about climate change have been shown to be a true warning. My mother had to evacuate from a fire. A friend has had their city flooded. A different friends home was damaged by a hurricane. I've been begged on the street for a drink during a heat wave.</comment></comment>


GraphHopper Routing Engine 0.11 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.graphhopper.com/blog/2018/09/17/graphhopper-routing-engine-0-11-release-open-sourcing-the-isochrone-module/ <comment><AUTHOR> With this release the Isochrone module is open source.</comment>


Challenger and learning Git rebase and resolve conflics - <AUTHOR>

# Here is the code:
# Challenge and learning Git rebase and resolve conflics
# you need to order into the master branch either git history and content of other two branches without adicional commits in history line.
# you can see result of this graph with 'gitx'
mkdir challenge_rebase; cd challenge_rebase
git init; touch content.txt; git add .;
echo 'A' >> content.txt; git commit -a -m 'A';
echo 'B' >> content.txt; git commit -a -m 'B';
git checkout -b foo master;
echo 'C' >> content.txt; git commit -a -m 'C';
echo 'D' >> content.txt; git commit -a -m 'D';
echo 'E' >> content.txt; git commit -a -m 'E';
echo 'F' >> content.txt; git commit -a -m 'F';
git checkout -b bar master;
echo 'G' >> content.txt; git commit -a -m 'G';
echo 'H' >> content.txt; git commit -a -m 'H';
echo 'I' >> content.txt; git commit -a -m 'I';
echo 'J' >> content.txt; git commit -a -m 'J';
git checkout master;
echo 'L' >> content.txt; git commit -a -m 'L';
echo 'M' >> content.txt; git commit -a -m 'M';
echo 'N' >> content.txt; git commit -a -m 'N';
# What is correct response to make order into the master branch either git history and content of other two branches without adicional commits in history line? <comment><AUTHOR>
        # result ...
        git rebase foo bar
        # ... resolve conflicts
        git add content.txt
        git rebase --continue

        # HERE is the trick... we have several ways to make this.
        git rebase --onto bar master~3 master
        # .. resolve conflicts
        git add .
        git rebase --continue</comment>


Python's Web Framework Benchmarks - <AUTHOR> http://klen.github.io/py-frameworks-bench/ <comment><USER2> A couple of suggestions for the author. These aren't meant to discourage; the opposite, actually.

1) Running benchmarks on a hosted VM introduces confounding [a] factors. Namely, contention. What happens if someone else is running benchmarks at the same time? Benchmarks are best run on isolated hardware, which is why it's so hard to find good benchmarks. Who has server-class hardware lying around to just run benchmarks on?

2) Expressing results in percentile format is great! Using line graphs to represent the data, not so much. Line graphs are used to "fill in the blanks" between points of data. When you draw a line between two points, you're saying, "for these x-axis values, the y-value is approximately _this_ ". This infers a progression, which isn't really relevant for percentile data. A clustered column or bar chart would be a better fit for this data, IMO.

3) A histogram of response time is often informative. Just be careful with your bin width. There are some good suggestions on Wikipedia [b].

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

b: [https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Histogram#Number_of_bins_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Histogram#Number_of_bins_and_width)

<comment><USER3> Addendum: one thing to cope with the confounding factors would be to replicate the test several times (ideally many times like 100+ while varying instance types).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is apples to watermelons comparision.

The remote test uses a new `requests` instance (tear down and set-up of a new HTTP request, not a session) for each call, except in Tornado , where it uses `tornado.httpclient.AsyncHTTPClient` and in muffin where it's using `aiohttp.request`.

The klein example uses `treq` while the aiohttp example uses `aiohttp.request`.

Requests might have a pretty API, but it is one of the, if not the worst performing http libraries you can use.

<comment><USER5> no klein in the actual test data. Pity, it's pretty fast I think. The test framework code for klein is not finished and I guess sqlalchemy won't perform that brilliant atop twisted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't a t2.medium server a poor choice for benchmarking? They're burstable, so CPU performance can vary over time. Unless you're _extremely_ careful with timing the tests, you'll get inconsistent results.

<comment><USER7> Yes. Using a VM on multitenant hardware is questionable enough, but using one that is _specifically designed_ to have variable performance is atrocious. Thankfully the author has provided the necessary info for someone else to repeat the tests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's also wheezy.web[1], which was very fast compared to ordinary Python web frameworks. When I tested it locally a year ago, the results were the following:

      == Time spent to handle one request ==

      CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     T7700  @ 2.40GHz

      WSGI      : 1 microseconds
      Wheezy    : 10 microseconds
      Bottle    : 38 microseconds
      Werkzeug  : 47 microseconds
      Morepath  : 115 microseconds
      Flask     : 193 microseconds
      Flask with Jinja: 267 microseconds
      Cherrypy  : 561 microseconds
      Django    : 816 microseconds

However, at the same time, this also made me more skeptical about the Python performance story. IIRC, wheezy.web was fast because it minimized the number of the function calls (only ~20 function calls per request were needed). This is reasonable, considering that function calls in Python are very costly, and there is no function inlining in CPython. (I'm not sure of PyPy, probably it has this kind of optimization?)

But less functions mean less modularity. I have to give up some modularity if I want to squeeze the last bit of performance from my Python code. I can't have both. This doesn't sound great because there has been a verified method to deal with this kind of problem - function inlining - for decades. And I cannot use it for Python.

[1] [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wheezy.web](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wheezy.web)

<comment><USER9> > there is no function inlining in CPython.

Couldn't this be done with a decorator that on the first call to the decorated function looks up the variable bindings, extracts the bytecode of called functions and then merges it into its own (and renames variables etc.)?

I'll leave the implementation as an exercise for the reader. :)

<comment><USER8> This is certainly an interesting idea. A quick Google search gave me this toy example: [1][2]

Of course making it work for all cases would be very hard due to the excessive dynamism of Python, but for simple arithmetic operations it could be made to work fairly well.

[1] [http://tomforb.es/automatically-inline-python-function- calls](http://tomforb.es/automatically-inline-python-function-calls)

[2] [https://github.com/orf/inliner](https://github.com/orf/inliner)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Suspicious that aiohttp has peewee async, but falcon gets synchronous sqlalchemy for its orm test? Seems like a fairly biased way to benchmark. Too many variables to actually compare the frameworks as things beside the framework are drastically different.

<comment><USER11> aiohttp is based on the stdlib event loop, it's likely to get much more support for async stuff. You can always plug gevent into Falcon, but you'll need a bit more luck finding compatible libraries though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The way I consult benchmarks is "use whatever cuts development time to a minimum, and then swap out the slow parts". Premature optimization, etc.

<comment><USER13> To be fair, when you're talking about a web framework that's not quite as practicable. Huge chunks of your code will be built to the opinions of that particular framework.

<comment><USER12> Definitely, but web apps usually consist of specific views, so there are specific things you can optimize. Like any codebase, there will be hotspots you can make faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> WHY WOULD YOU USE PIE CHARTS FOR THIS

<comment><USER15> Because the line charts get difficult when numbers are similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> When it comes to web frameworks, the things you should look at before performance are: community support, how active the project is, what does the framework provide me free out of the box, # of bugs, etc...

You'll not bottleneck on the framework most of the times.

</comment><comment><USER17> [https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/)

Maybe this is more useful?

<comment><USER18> The current test types in our benchmarks (I work at TechEmpower) aim to establish a high-water mark for web frameworks and platforms. If you review the implementation requirements, included is a brief rationale for each test type:

[https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=code](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=code)

For example, the "plaintext" test focuses on raw request routing and HTTP parsing throughput and is intended to allow ultra-high performance servers to shine. Meanwhile, the "fortunes" test is intended to exercise a more diverse spectrum of framework functionality including database connectivity, the ORM, dynamic-sized collections, in-memory sorting, server-side templates, and XSS countermeasures.

Future tests in our project will likely exercise still more framework and platform capabilities, and with more computationally-demanding requirements. I believe this will go further to demonstrate the appeal of high-performance platforms and frameworks. Presently, it is easy to point out that few applications require the capacity to serve 10,000 or 100,000 requests per second. I routinely suggest that a real-world application is likely to perform at 1% to 10% of the high-water mark we show. Where it gets interesting, then, is determining if 10% of 50,000 rps or 10% of 500 rps is workable for you.

Despite conventional wisdom that suggests that a web service is constrained by external systems such as databases and peer services—and not dismissing that as untrue, but rather exaggerated—we believe that real-world web applications are often constrained by the platform or framework. In fact, it is my opinion that selecting a high-performance framework and platform (that suits your development efficiency requirements!) is precisely how you avoid premature optimization. By making a reasonable decision early on, you defer scale pain that is all too common with low-performance platforms until later in your project's life-cycle. Do you want to bring out the big architecture guns and increased system complexity at 10,000 users or at 100,000 or 1,000,000 users? Indeed, nothing is a drop-in replacement for something you know and love. There will be some learning curve if you're moving from one framework to another, and even greater learning is needed if switching platforms or language. But these inflection points in programming are needed sometimes, and you may find it's good to position them at the start of a project rather than midstream.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I mean how much latency is even acceptable? If Django is able to deliver a result in 200ms can I even accept it being delivered with a latency of 280, 400, 700ms? The long tail of these graphs seems almost useless to me for real live scaling, as the latencies involved would simply force you to scale out more (if possible).

</comment><comment><USER20> > Nothing here, just some measures for you.

That is the right conclusion, and I applaud the author. I just wonder why people would even take anything at all from this?

</comment><comment><USER21> Great little article.

One odd thing is that the article used 2 python workers when using gunicorn but a single when using tornado. Seems a bit unfair to say the least :)

</comment><comment><USER22> I just don't care too much about benchmarks. I'm more interested in what its like to program.

</comment><comment><USER23> If anyone has a very opinionated conclusion about this I'd love to hear it.

</comment><comment><USER24> sad to see no web2py here :|

<comment><USER25> Would also love to see web2py.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Highcharts makes this page impossible to scroll on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's missing wheezy.web which should be the fastest

</comment><comment><USER28> no testing using gevent ? I mean flask+gevent does boost performance quite a bit</comment>


Google Launches Program to Help Small Businesses Become More Visible - <AUTHOR> http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/244322 <comment><USER2> You know, why does Google always claim its programs are to "help" small business, and everyone buys it? This program is really to "help" small business use Adwords.</comment>