Investor Herd Dynamics - <AUTHOR> http://paulgraham.com/herd.html <comment><USER2> This is spot on. When I found out that a fellow entrepreneur had been pushed and pulled around trying to get funding for months without any solid commitment I put two of the angels involved on the spot in a meeting and asked them if I committed a certain sum of money for how much we could count on them. The round closed with 5 investors within a few days.

All it takes is for someone to cross the bridge of commitment and others will follow. The fact that I'm probably two orders of magnitude poorer than the other investors probably helped in embarrassing them to make a move, it was literally peanuts to them and the company went on to moderate success.

<comment><USER3> This is a problem when noone wants to lead though.

Here at my company we tried to make a pre-A round of sorts (mostly because we are in Brazil, and investors here are unwilling to invest anything close to a A round here).

We had several people commit saying that if other people go, they will go too... But we found noone to commit as leader, and all the other commited investors refused to go without a lead investor, kinda annoying situation.

Happily our seed investor liked our recent results and expanded his seed investment instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seeing that YC's demo day is coming soon, it's awesome to be able to peer into PG's mind - this essay along with "How to Convince Investors" must be the exact advice relayed on to the current YC batch.

<comment><USER5> That is exactly right. I'm trying to get a complete guide to fundraising done in time for Demo Day, so I don't have to repeat all this stuff verbally (and incompletely) yet again. There is at least one more coming on fundraising tactics.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for sharing this with all of us outside the YC world! I've really appreciated the shower of wisdom in your recent burst of essays, and I'm sure others appreciate it too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd always wondered if anyone could upstage PG on HN. Apparently, Elon Musk can.

<comment><USER8> Heh, true. However, this short essay contains more useful actionable advice for HN readers than is typical even for PG, so I hope it doesn't get overlooked. Very very impressed, here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _After you raise the first million dollars, the company is at least a million dollars more valuable, because it 's the same company as before, plus it has a million dollars in the bank._

This seems a bit specious. Sure, the lower bound on the pre-money valuation for investor #2 should be the post-money valuation for investor #1, not the pre-money valuation for investor #1; but the valuation _per share_ won't necessarily be any different.

<comment><USER10> Startup valuations are not accurate. Your comment essentially proves the point: If an investor is going to fund a company at valuation X, they prefer that X is a combination of cash and stock and not purely stock. This implies that a dollar of valued startup is not worth a dollar, which should be an axiom.

A 3 MM dollar company comprised of 2 MM stock and 1 MM cash is more desirable than one with just 3MM in stock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _" [2] Founders are often surprised by this, but investors can get very emotional. Or rather indignant; that's the main emotion I've observed; but it is very common, to the point where it sometimes causes investors to act against their own interests. I know of one investor who invested in a startup at a $15 million valuation cap. Earlier he'd had an opportunity to invest at a $5 million cap, but he refused because a friend who invested earlier had been able to invest at a $3 million cap."_

I'm not _surprised_ , per se, but rather always amazed whenever I hear stories of rich people acting in ways inimical to their economic interests. One would think that an experienced (I guess) businessman, such as a VC, would be somewhat more rational than that. Then again, this _is_ an article about 'Investor Herd Dynamics', so I suppose that should inform my opinions about human behaviour.

</comment><comment><USER12> It seems like the earliest investor in a multi-party round invariably gets shortchanged in the literal dollar value of the deal. If committed investors raise the valuation of a startup, would it make sense for a startup to offer a slightly-sweetened valuation for the first investor to commit?

I understand that no one likes to have the price raised on them later, but perhaps the underlying truth of increasing valuations could be restated in a different way so it seems more like a discount to the first-in vs a price-hike to the last in.

<comment><USER8> What's lost in absolute $ terms is (IMHO) more than made up for by being known as the early bird, which status will yield other opportunities. In game theory terms being early is not optimal in a single round but close to optimal in the iterated competition that more often prevails.

<comment><USER13> But it's very rarely known who is the early bird in investment rounds.

<comment><USER14> It is by the other investors. And the best investment opportunities come when other investors ask you to be in a syndicate for a deal they're leading. They may do this because they hope that next time you're the early-bird investor, you will remember them when you are helping form the syndicate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "VCs will sometimes ask which other VCs you're talking to, but you should never tell them."

Why not? (Unless I missed it, the article doesn't explicitly say.)

<comment><USER14> Sigh. I do this all the time as an early-stage investor. But I don't do it to game the valuation, I do it so we can share the task of due diligence. Maybe I understand the market/customer and the other VC knows the founders, or vice- versa. It's nothing sinister, it's just a more efficient way to get the information I need quickly and cheaply.

There is a lot more than gut judgement involved in deciding to give somebody I just recently met a large sum of my money. I don't let other VCs dilute my judgement but I certainly listen to them when they have more knowledge of the relevant facts about a company, its people, its product, or its market.

Note that I'm an angel investor, so I try to make sure the cost of due diligence is proportional to the amount I'm investing. If I were a fund and writing million dollar checks, I would spend the time to do all the due diligence myself.

<comment><USER2> Big difference, angel and VC are not interchangeable in this discussion and the article explicitly mentions VCs, not angels.

<comment><USER14> He does say that, that angels cooperate more with each other than VCs do. So yes.

But I think the salient point is whether the investor is asking who the other investors are so they can cooperate with them, compete with them, or collude with them. And that depends on the investor, not whether they are an angel or a VC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > The best investors aren't influenced much by the opinion of other investors. > It would only dilute their own judgment to average it together with other > people's.

I don't know anything about startup investing. But I do know about machine learning. And you can often improve an ensemble predictor by adding (many) weaker features and averaging them with an already strong predictor.

One shouldn't confuse the prediction of an average predictor with the average of a bunch of predictions that come from a pool of on the whole mediocre predictors. Averaging is really a strong operation for prediction. Of course, it does help if the individual predictors are themselves independent or uncorrelated with each other, which I guess tends to be very untrue in a herd.

</comment><comment><USER17> Can someone point to a link which explains the math of startup fund raising? I was thinking about it, and what I get is a paradox:

I assume the definition of raising money is that the original owner gives some percentage of the company to a new owner, and the new owner gives an amount of money to the company.

Let's say the company's valuation is 1 million dollars. Let's say the owner sells 10% for 0.1 million dollars.

In a perfect market the company's new valuation is obviously 1.1 million dollars: the original value in the company's resources (people, etc...) plus the 0.1 million in the bank.

On the other hand in a perfect market perfect owners made a deal in which the original owner's wealth is the same before and after the deal.

Before the deal he was worth 1million. After the deal he is worth 0.9*x, where x is the new valuation of the company.

So:

1million dollars = 0.9x

x = 1.1111' million dollars

So which is the correct new valuation: 1.1, or 1.1111'? Or something different?

Maybe the deal have to be made in infinitely small pieces, so the result is coming from some kind of differential equation?

<comment><USER14> The money buys new shares in the company. Think about it in per share terms. In your example:

\- Pre-money there are 1,000 shares, valued at $1,000 each

\- The company sells 100 new shares for $1,000 each

\- Post-money there are 1,100 shares

So after selling 100 shares, the original owner now owns 1,000/1,100 shares = 90.9%. The new valuation is 1,100 shares * $1,000/share = $1,100,000.

<comment><USER17> Now everything is clear, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wrote about this issue a couple years ago, observing similar behavior. I used a modified horse gambling game as a metaphor for the investor dynamic.

"It's easier to play the option than the bet." [http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2010/12/13/its-easier-to-play- the...](http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2010/12/13/its-easier-to-play-the-option- than-the-bet)

        In this new race, small signals have a big impact.
        Charge ahead suddenly and you might get your 3 spots
        filled. Convince a top-tier gambler to go to bat for
        you, and you're all set — your other two spots will
        fill up quickly. If you've been in the race before
        and had your spots filled up quickly, you'll likely
        get them filled up quickly when you enter the race
        again.

</comment><comment><USER19> We're in a strange place right now, sat in the middle of two pieces of startup advice.

Piece of advice #1: "The time to raise money is not when you need it, or when you reach some artificial deadline like a Demo Day. It's when you can convince investors, and not before."

Piece of advice #2: The best time to raise VC money is when you have product/market fit and need rocket fuel to grow.

We were having conversations with investors to suss out the London startup scene (we feel like outsiders mostly having kept ourselves to ourselves) and to make connections with industry leaders who might make great advisors.

2 Weeks ago these conversations suddenly turned into "Shut up and take my money.". Once this started happening, it happened at every meeting, with investors swiftly upping the amount they believe we should take... we have a herd all telling us to take their money. We haven't done a proper pitch to anyone.

We were aiming at #2 (product/market fit), and have stumbled upon #1 (convinced investors forming a herd).

The problem is expectations. We are at seed stage, and are developing the product/market fit. We have customers lined up, but we're not yet seeing good traction with the existing customers we're engaged with. We want to carry on improving the product, testing as we go.

If we take VC money we very much believe we'd be under expectation to focus on growth before the product is the right one for the market (it has a lot of promise today, but it's not yet proving itself fully).

Our current view is to to explain to investors/VCs that we're still seed and take the money only if it doesn't come with conditions and is understood we're still seed.

Not a lot of wisdom out there on whether you should decline VC money. We're not of the belief that all money is good, especially if it proves to be a distraction from just making the a great product that customers really want.

<comment><USER20> If you have the luxury to choose from multiple committed investors (and I recommend you triple-check your assumption that these people are indeed committed), then I would use that leverage to set the bar for your ideal terms. Importantly, terms can have many dimensions: in addition to the dollar amount and dilution, you can set expectations in terms of your stage, your focus, autonomy in changing direction etc. You can also filter by personal fit with the investor, how soon they hope for liquidity, their personal track record and reputation (not the firm's), etc. Just like a great hire, you should be wow-ed and be excited to work with them.

The more explicit the expectations, the better! Get to know them, ask them about their styles and priorities, check their track record with previous entrepreneurs (not just active investments! their loyalties may be mixed and they will lack the perspective).

It seems like you also have the luxury of not raising money at all for another X months (another assumption I assume you've quantified and triple-checked), so that makes it easy to walk away if the bar is not reached. Just like any other deal, your leverage is only as strong as your plan B.

I may be stating the obvious. In any case, good luck! "Shut up and take my money" is always a good problem to have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does this mean that in most deals the investors involved don't know who else is in the syndicate until after-the-fact, if there are others?

</comment><comment><USER22> Company isn't necessarily worth $1m more because it has $1m in the bank. Think of the dot-com bubble in 90s. All these companies with millions in their bank accounts that never sold anything to anyone for even one cent. But were burning through cash like crazy. Would you invest in them just because they have millions on the bank account?

The market is washed with cheap money courtesy of the FED. According to one study VCs in the US gave _worse_ return in the past decade than blue chip stock. High risk, high return companies have had worse performance in the past decade than low risk, low return. This is not good statistics at all.

[http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/05/07/how- venture...](http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/05/07/how-venture- capital-is-broken/) [http://www.verisi.com/resources/venture-capital- performance....](http://www.verisi.com/resources/venture-capital- performance.htm)

The market is drunk on the money provided by the FED. We'll all have horrible hangover after all is said and done. (i.e. the FED eventually rises interest rates).

edit: I love it how people down vote just because I said something opposite to what PG claims. And then no response neither ;-) Somehow this actually makes me feel good! Because it looks like I'm right as nobody replied.

<comment><USER23> the business cycle goes up; the business cycle goes down. We all know this to be the case, and the business cycle is obviously up, so quit whining and get to work.

If you have no name, this is the time to make your name. If you have a name, this is the time to make money with that name. These are the times in which you have the most leverage.

Yes, of course, the business cycle will go down again. when will it change direction? How sharp will that transition be? Nobody knows. Worrying about that is... trying to know the mind of god. We all have a set of tools, a set of resources and abilities. We need to use those resources and abilities to make enough money (or enough notoriety) that we will be able to deal with the thin times. Now is the time to run hard, not to wonder about macro. There will be plenty of time for that during the next downturn.

Sitting here and complaining about the business cycle doesn't help you, it doesn't help me, and who knows, maybe some people feel that it brings that day of "the business cycle goes down" closer to now. That was the primary reason why I'd guess you got down-voted.

The other thing? Do you remember the '90s? I worked through the crash. It was not at all obvious ahead of time, which companies would come through, and which companies would not. I mean, it seems obvious now, sure, but it was not obvious then.

<comment><USER22> >the business cycle goes up; the business cycle goes down. We all know this to be the case, and the business cycle is obviously up, so quit whining and get to work.

I do work. Business cycle is up temporarily on cheap credit. There is no substance to it. 70% of new hires since 2008 in the US are part time. The debt to GDP ratio is higher than ever. Food stamps are on record high. Inflation if used Ronald Reagan years formula and not today's hocus-pocus hedonistic whatever is at 10%. The whole thing seems to work just because of the interest rates at 0% since 2008. And you can't have them at zero forever.

> Sitting here and complaining about the business cycle doesn't help you, it > doesn't help me, and who knows, maybe some people feel that it brings that > day of "the business cycle goes down" closer to now. That was the primary > reason why I'd guess you got down-voted.

Wow. If 50 million Americans on food stamps, 10% inflation rate, and average real wage adjusted for inflation lower than in 1960s is up in the business cycle, I'm afraid to ask what will be down. Greece?

> The other thing? Do you remember the '90s? I worked through the crash. It > was not at all obvious ahead of time, which companies would come through, > and which companies would not. I mean, it seems obvious now, sure, but it > was not obvious then.

No, it wasn't. The same like right now it is not obvious to you that the "up" you perceive is just a bubble in the US Treasuries. Don't worry, will be obvious to you soon as well.

BTW, you haven't addressed anything that has to do with extremely poor VCs performance in the past decade from my post. And that $1m on the company's bank account usually doesn't translate into the company being worth $1m more. Which was my main point. Care to talk about this?

<comment><USER23> >Business cycle is up temporarily on cheap credit. There is no substance to it.

The money will pay your bills as well as any other money.

My point here is that you can't do anything about this ebb and flow of money, 'fake' or not. Point is, you need some. I need some. Not a whole hell of a lot, really, on a global scale, but you need some money very badly. Even if it's "fake" money that isn't being managed in the way you like.

>70% of new hires since 2008 in the US are part time. The debt to GDP ratio is higher than ever. Food stamps are on record high.

The market for labor is intensely local, but local in a different way from the market for real-estate. Yeah, most folks are still getting shit upon. The business cycle isn't 'up' for them at all.

But it's 'up' for the sort who read hacker news. Engineer salaries are through the roof. I can't keep a PFY. Used to be that I'd keep someone for years if I hired them full-time; tens of months if I hired them part-time. The last few PFYs got yanked out from under me within the first month or two. [1]

The bubble is localized to our industry (and to a lesser extent, to my physical area.)

You.. sound foreign, so I'm guessing you don't remember what it was like in silicon valley and outlying areas in the early to mid-aughts? [2] It was /really bad/ for computer folks, and really not all that bad for everyone else. I had many, many friends who were of my technical level working retail. It was really bad for us. (but the retail jobs were still there; everyone else was largely fine.)

Right now? it's our turn for the good times, while everyone else suffers. I'm not saying it's fair or good... just that it is, and shouting that money is a government construct, and that they are trying their damnedest to generate some inflation (no shit.) changes nothing.

>Inflation if used Ronald Reagan years formula and not today's hocus-pocus hedonistic whatever is at 10%. The whole thing seems to work just because of the interest rates at 0% since 2008. And you can't have them at zero forever.

I don't understand why people seem to think inflation is some kind of crazy boogyman. Think about it. Everyone is in debt. Much of that is fixed-rate debt. Real inflation (including wage inflation) would be good for all of those people.

In fact, I personally believe inflation, nationwide, really is close to as low as they say. It's hard to have real inflation without wage inflation, and we're only seeing that here in silicon valley. From what I understand, this is a problem. We need inflation (especially wage inflation) to deal with our consumer debt problem.

Now, what we've been seeing is inflation in commodities, which is about the worst-case all around. We need inflation in wages (which will result in general price inflation, but so long as wages inflate, too, I think that's just fine.)

Of course, all that macro bullshit is just that; it's bullshit. I'm no expert, and I'm not convinced at all that the experts know anything themselves.

I do have some experiences with this industry, though, and the bit about making hay while the sun is shining? it's real. It's way easier to make career progress while the (local) economy is up.

[1]I don't begrudge them that; that's the whole deal with hiring apprentices. They take the job for low pay so they can get the job for high pay after they have built some experience with you. If one of your employees gets hired away for 2x or 3x the maximum amount you could pay them, there's really nothing to do but congratulate them and ask if they know anyone who might want their old job. (That's how I get my best recruiting leads.) But it does mean that the job market for smart young programmers/sysadmins is hotter than it was.

[2]I mean no insult; Your English is not terrible for a native speaker, and English is a tough language. I'm a monoglot, myself.

I guess the corollary here is that if you still aren't in the US or in silicon valley, well, you probably see things rather differently than I do.

<comment><USER22> thanks for the reply. The thing with inflation: true, it helps those in debt. But is destroys savers. Inflation is a simple mechanism of wealth transfer from savers to debtors. You described who the debtors are. I agree. Let me tell you who the savers are: mostly retirees (401k), elderly people who use their life savings to pay the bills, etc, and others like successful businessmen who just want to save. I just don't think that it is morally ok and I know that it is not economically ok (due to moral hazard) to just move wealth from people who worked and saved to ones who were irresponsible with their debt, took risks, and now want someone else to be responsible for that. Because there are more debtors than savers then simple political calculation says screw savers, let's rescue debtors as they are the majority of voters. And here we go:

Insurance premium for me is up 20% year to year. Food is up. Medication is up. Gas is up. All kinds of insurances are up. And all of these hurt common folk the most too. Guys living paycheck to paycheck. But those don't even get what the inflation is and how it translates to their daily lives. So the Government just continues printing.

Now talking about good times we have now in the IT. My answer to this consists of 2 points: (1) It's not only IT. Just read somewhere that some parameters of the housing market are as "hot" now as they were in 2007 in some areas (Las Vegas); cars are also selling as well as in 2007; etc. Which takes me to (2) The FED by keeping interest rates at 0 since 2008 was able not only to reinflate housing and IT bubbles but probably to create even more bubbles all over the place. So what I think and of course I may be wrong -- what you are experiencing with your new hires now is just another bubble built on cheap credit. Since 2008 the whole world has been buying US Treasuries like never before, funding US Government, financial sector and big businesses on unprecedented scale. The VCs I mentioned - how in the world can you be a VC and have worse return than S&P500 for the past decade? And still get funding! Why? Because with interest rates at 0% nobody wants to keep cash or money on deposits - everybody has to "invest" (or rather speculate). So that's what happening. If you do nothing with that cash you loose 10% year to year. So you invest no matter what. In IT, real estate, startups, whatever. Once the world stops buying US Treasuries on such a scale and actually starts selling them, the interest rates will go up. So then the question is why to invest in all these crazy startups, equities, bonds, real estate, etc. When just keeping cash at the bank deposit returns 5% a year? Or maybe even better at 18% (as it used to be the case in 1981). That's when you will see - sorry for putting it so bluntly - how much all these VCs, IT sector, real estate, etc. are really worth. Without cheap credit doing the work of life support.

BTW, I'm an (proud) US citizen, originally from Poland. As crazy as it may sound to you, after almost 10 years in the US (9 years IT experience) I decided to move back to Poland because I'm really worried that the US economy may face extremely serious crisis. Comparable to hyperinflation in Germany in 1920s. Think of me as of one of these tin hat guys or gold bugs ;-) My English sucks at times. I try to reread whatever I write, but sometimes I just write stuff and don't really care and well, it shows. My apologies, I tried to be better this time, lol. Nice talking to you btw.

I get you. You are a business guy doing his thing and you could care less about all the economics and politics BS. Honestly, I think that's great. I don't want to waste your time, so just saying hello and take care.

<comment><USER23> >Let me tell you who the savers are: mostly retirees (401k), elderly people who use their life savings to pay the bills, etc, and others like successful businessmen who just want to save. I just don't think that it is morally ok and I know that it is not economically ok (due to moral hazard)

and don't forget bondholders. But yes, inflation (I mean, flat, across the board inflation, and it never actually happens that way) tends to hurt the rich and tends to benefit the poor. The view that the rich are rich because they are morally superior is pretty common, as far as I can tell; more common here than abroad. It's a view that I disagree with.

<comment><USER22> How the QE works is that these trillions and trillions are pumped from the FED directly to big zombie banks to help them stay afloat. As big banks spend these money by investing in bonds, equities, VCs, whatever, the economy as a whole starts feeling better, I agree. And the prices rise too. The problem is that the last ones to receive it still have to pay harsh inflation tax even though they didn't get much out of the benefit. It works like this (money creation): FED --> banks --> whoever banks loan money to or invest in (investment banks) --> VCs, real estate, homeowners (from your example), etc. --> whoever these folks spend money to. The poor gets poorer in that scenario, while rich get richer (and I'm a republican here, mind you)

So, to answer what you said -- newly created money benefits those who are first to receive it. If the owner of the printing press (the Government) makes it such that group A receives the money first and then decides how to spend it, then the group A will benefit at the expense of everybody else. If group A decides to spend it on people in group B then these folks will mainly benefit as well. And then group B spends on others, so on. The last one to receive it is the big looser. If the Government policy is to hand over the newly printed money to the healthcare companies - healthcare wins at the expense of everybody else. If the Government decides to spend it on the Travel industry - these folks win while we all get hit with the inflation. Etc, etc. It's not really rich vs poor debate, it is who gets the freshly printed money from the FED first is the one who benefits at the expense of everybody else.

That's why inflation is bad. Inflation is the reason why you see the gap between rich and poor - worlwide, not only in the US - getting bigger. Because somehow the FED _always_ hands over newly created money to the banks. And I'm not a socialist saying it's bad on moral grounds - far from it. I'm saying that's a sick economy. The FED should be abolished and money should go there where the markets want the money to go. Without being influenced by politicians and their agenda. That's what - to me - true republicans hail - free economy. The FED needs to be abolished. And as can be easily shown this money creation process will create bubbles. If newly created money goes to IT, IT has a bubble. That's what happened when the FED printed in 1990s to go over Savings and Loan Crisis -- all the newly created money created IT bubble. To fight off the results of that bubble bursting they printed even more -- that's what caused to Housing Bubble. And when this one bursted (they always burst) - they created the US Treasuries bubble. The Ultimate Bubble. The Wholy Grail of Bubbles. Bubble in the reserve currency of the world. Bubble in everything across the spectrum. I'm not going to sit around in the US and wait for that one to burst as well.

Bauer Mayer Rothschild, 1838: "Let me issue and control a Nation's money and I care not who makes its laws"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Other ways to read Hacker News - <AUTHOR> https://hackerbits.com/uncategorized/improve-hacker-news-ui/ <comment><USER2> For me the native version is stunningly good. Both on desktop and mobile devices. It loads tremendously fast, has the correct font types and no smuck.

The only sidestep I sometimes make is to Boreal[1][2] as a native ios app. It has a more convenient way if reading the comments. Double tap a comment to collapse instead of hit the little minus sign. Especially as I read with only my left hand and minus sign is on the right. Funny how little things can be so great. In addition it's indenting is easier to follow. However, I keep switching back to the default hn site as ios doesn't let you set chrome as default browser so you can't open all articles default in chrome from Boreal (you can in safari, embedded safari, their native browser or their in-app browser).

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9830622](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9830622) (old version, current version is much better).

[2] [https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/boreal-hacker-news- client/id...](https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/boreal-hacker-news- client/id925851179?mt=8)

<comment><USER3> It loads fast and doesn't use web fonts, but that's not really a high bar, for essentially a forum.

Apart from that it's not exactly a pleasant reading experience.

Tiny text for modern displays. Poor typography (bad line-height of content, needlessly cramped padding in listing). Ugly beige background colour, randomly constrained to a container, (why not be all-white or all-beige). Poor click targets for smaller displays.

On desktop, I use the Georgify [1] Chrome extension, fixes my (desktop- related) complaints above whilst staying minimal. For mobile I use the Premii iOS app (it also has web and android versions) [2]. Well designed, lots of nice features like the comment collapsing you mention.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/georgify/ofjfdfale...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/georgify/ofjfdfaleomlfanfehgblppafkijjhmi?hl=en)

[2] [https://github.com/premii/hn](https://github.com/premii/hn)

<comment><USER4> I disagree all of your criticisms. Apart from the last one, they are all subjective and I disagree without a reason. I like what I see. Wrt sizes of the _click targets_ , HN, unlike many products of elegant (!) design, let's you zoom in an out, so that is not a problem.

<comment><USER3> Zooming in and out and panning around a webpage is a terrible user experience in my opinion.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I like the option to pan and zoom. But if I have to do so, that is indicative of a bad design in my book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had no idea there were people that needed to view HN differently - let alone 21+ ways. I find the "native" presentation basically perfect for both desktop and mobile browsing.

<comment><USER7> This is one of the few sites I frequent where I don't wish they would improve the interface. I've been dreading the day HN gets the "Web 2.0" makeover and turns into yet another information sparse automatic scrolling back button hating javascript nightmare.

Seriously, for the main interface it is pretty much perfect. Like Slashdot before they fucked it up. Or Ars before they fucked it up.

<comment><USER8> > _I 've been dreading the day HN gets the_

Dread something else; that won't happen. We love the text-based, information- dense, minimal style that pg created. I loved it years before becoming a mod and can't imagine changing it. Besides, we're so old-fashioned now that we're due to become retro chic in another half-cycle. Why sell at the bottom?

<comment><USER7> You won't, but what about the next guy? That's always the way these things go. Someone creates a nice simple service and gets a ton of traffice, but gets bored with running it and moves on. Next guy goes "This site looks like it is from 1997, and it's barely monetized at all, I've got this book on web design that will make it look 1000% better by getting rid of all of these ugly words and making it so beautifully minimal."

<comment><USER8> In that case we will have done a bad job of picking 'next guy'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The most useful HN addon is HN Replies by Dan Grossman. You get an email if someone replies to your comment. Simple UI and real value.

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

<comment><USER10> do you really need notifications that badly? whats wrong with clicking "threads" (4th link on the top of page) once per day.

<comment><USER9> Because if an active debate is going on in response to my comment, I'd like to be able to participate. But, I'm not so self-centered as to assume that is likely, so I don't normally check.

<comment><USER10> and at the same time you are ready to receive live updates while eating dinner/taking nr2/attending funeral. You are conceding control over your time(life) to some third party.

<comment><USER9> It's an email. I get to choose when to read it and whether to click the link and respond!

<comment><USER10> Iv got a feeling most people will use it with push notification to 'stay connected', brrrr

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These things come and go, the annoying part is verifying they are still maintained. I recently collected this list along with the best discussion, typically from their launch:

[http://hackernewsgrid.com](http://hackernewsgrid.com) | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15078605](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15078605) (2017)

[https://www.taggernews.com](https://www.taggernews.com) | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14337275](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14337275) (2017)

[https://vue-hn.now.sh](https://vue-hn.now.sh) & [https://hnews.xyz](https://hnews.xyz) | [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hnews.xy](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hnews.xy) (2017-ish; 3 discussions)

[https://tophn.info](https://tophn.info) | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13782574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13782574) (2017; only 1 comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com](https://hn.algolia.com) | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8874801](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8874801) (2015; official search provider)

[http://ihackernews.com](http://ihackernews.com) | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1694049](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1694049) -ish (2010; ran an API for a while)

[https://hckrnews.com](https://hckrnews.com) | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14962820](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14962820) & [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1722914](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1722914) (2010)

Many of these discussions include comments vouching for these and other alternative UIs.

App recommendations would also be appreciated (if you created or regularly use the app yourself).

<comment><USER12> I've been using

        https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.hidroh.materialistic

For my day to day browsing. It has a pretty fully fledged feature set, including saving stories for later, and some neat aggregates (top last 24 hours is labelled "catch up" or something similar).

<comment><USER13> Yes I really like Materialistic too. Using it now, in fact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What I would like to see is a sort of /r/DepthHub - a set of permalinks to interesting (thoughtful or factual or those that you can learn something from) discussions in flamewarred articles or the comments by subject matter experts 3 replies deep that can't bubble up to the top of comments section.

EDIT: hmm so I've created it: [https://www.reddit.com/r/HNDepthHub/](https://www.reddit.com/r/HNDepthHub/) Submissions welcome!

<comment><USER11> Not sure you've checked already or not, but this seems helpful: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=best%20comments](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=best%20comments)

And back in the day when karma points were public: [https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&type=comment](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&type=comment)

Are there any HN-ers whose public list of favorite comments contains what you're looking for? I typically use the functionality more as a bookmark. [https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=yread&comments=t](https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=yread&comments=t)

I encourage you to seed your new subreddit with some examples.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been using MiniHack[1] for iPhone for a year or two; great way of interacting with HN (can vote, comment, etc).

[1]: [https://itunes.apple.com/th/app/minihack-hacker-news- client/...](https://itunes.apple.com/th/app/minihack-hacker-news- client/id631108846?mt=8)

<comment><USER16> Can't recommend MiniHack highly enough. Love the scroll down to next comment tree feature, just to name one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wish there were a way to display news from a custom time interval, as opposed to always getting news from a fixed interval of time (I think there are three different settings as of now).

If I haven't visited HN for, say, 6 days, I find it'd be really helpful to be able to display all news from this time period, based on number of upvotes in descending order.

In other words: I'd appreciate complete control over the algorithm that decides which news to display: time interval, minimum upvotes, minimum comment count, upvotes-per-hour, etc.

<comment><USER18> Try [http://searchhn.com/](http://searchhn.com/)

This comes close to your specs.

<comment><USER19> Here is another one with custom range settings:

[https://hn.algolia.com](https://hn.algolia.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wrote a very basic script to rank hacker news stories based on comment/score ratio, found it to be pretty interesting:

[https://github.com/paradite/hn-ratio](https://github.com/paradite/hn-ratio)

The idea is that stories with high ratio would mean active/intense debate, whereas low ratio means extremely insightful post. Both categories are very interesting to me.

Example output:

[https://github.com/paradite/hn- ratio/blob/master/results/201...](https://github.com/paradite/hn- ratio/blob/master/results/2017-aug-09_03-01-16-visual.txt)

Sadly I never completed the project with a web UI.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've used the Hacker News Enhancement Suite for the past few years and thought it did just enough things to make the site a tad more usable without going overboard:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- enhanc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm?utm_source=chrome-app-launcher- info-dialog)

<comment><USER22> I've been making the switch from Chrome to Firefox over the past month, and HNES is the one thing I truly miss that I haven't found a good replacement for.

<comment><USER23> I use the "Chrome Store Foxified" extension which lets you install some Chrome plugins including HNES.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> maze-le They didn't even mention haxor-news. This is basically a command-line interface with a lot of features. Maybe there is justifieble objection to the "read Hacker News without the eyestrain"-bit in this case.

[0]: [https://github.com/donnemartin/haxor- news](https://github.com/donnemartin/haxor-news)

<comment><USER24> I'm surprised as well! Although I prefer hn-cli, a much simpler way to browse the headlines and jump directly to the articles you want to read.

[https://github.com/rafaelrinaldi/hn-cli](https://github.com/rafaelrinaldi/hn- cli)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> just use [https://news.ycombinator.com](https://news.ycombinator.com) \- works great on mobile too

<comment><USER26> But that boring web app doesn't even have pretty fonts.

It even has a "next" button, so you can see more than 30 posts, who needs that?

It shows the point count in a smaller greyer font, instead of a big circle, so I can't instinctively choose posts by popularity instead of their headlines.

It doesn't even pull up a random image from the article that might not have anything to do with the actual topic, and display it along with a preview of text, so I can't get distracted and pulled by fundamentally more attractive colorful pictures instead of boring text topics.

It's not written in the newest JavaScript framework, it's just plain old HTML, some simple CSS and Racket making it all run. Racket! That doesn't even have "JS" in its name. What is this, 2013?

Whoever wrote that version clearly doesn't know how Hacker News is meant to be viewed.

 _ahem_

But seriously, the Hacker News site is one of my favorite "news" sites. Simple, clean, no distractions, just headlines.

Also, some of the websites listed in the article are quite useful, like the search engine. Most of the others are simply different ways of reading Hacker News, not "better". Might be better for some people. Not for me.

<comment><USER27> I like it. The code blocks on mobile are terrible (totally unusable) and the up/down vote buttons could be a bit bigger, but overall it's pretty good.

<comment><USER28> aannnnd that is about all, which is kind of amazing really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The most important feature of [http://hn.premii.com](http://hn.premii.com) isn't in the list: * it caches a text (some pictures but no styles/css) version of the article on their servers, with saves hundreds of MBs per month from my mobile traffic quota

I prefer their iOS app, because it works even a bit better as a native app.

<comment><USER30> This is the one I'm using on mobile. Yes the caching version acts a bit like read mode in Firefox, sometimes it fails though.

Also you can't comment with it, which is both frustrating and somehow ... useful.

The real problem to using a third party site is that it defeats the noprocrast setting ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The best way is Firefox's RSS reader via:

      /bigrss

The worst, by far, is any list that shows actual article thumbnails, as rendered by a common, modern, up-to-date web browser.

Looking at HN repackages, that actually show me the visual snapshots of all the articles from the main page, I find myself consumed by nausea, seeing the cacophony of repellent ad-addled page layouts all together, all at once.

A comparable awful experience is letting the Slack app stream live updates into a dedicated channel with the RSS Slack app, totally uncurated, so that you can scroll back through a week's worth of article snippets. That little experiment proved to me how finicky I really am, compared to what so many others happen to find interesting, and how small any given individual's tendencies might be, when taken as a defined subset within a large community.

Everything else is so-so, in between.

</comment><comment><USER28> IMO, HN interface may be one of the best I've encountered online _. I feel nothing tedious in its layout or functionality. The 'need' for change can be a destructive compulsion.

_except how quotes of comments are displayed.

</comment><comment><USER11> Are there any audio summaries of HN? At this point I'd even appreciate pointers to listenable podcasts which primarily consist of discussion/opinions on recent HN stories, but I'd really appreciate a "just the facts, m'am" summary.

Preliminary research:

Some sort of experimental text-to-speech of the article titles: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnAsMIl3kF9LAYJuKxH8Ebw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnAsMIl3kF9LAYJuKxH8Ebw) (last updated: June 2017)

</comment><comment><USER32> Shameless plug: I use my own home written app [http://tophn.info](http://tophn.info) to keep an eye on the movement of the top news articles during the day, in real time and jump straight to the comments.

I also wrote about how I built it using Vue.js and RethinkDB... [https://hackernoon.com/tophn-a-fun-side-project-built- with-v...](https://hackernoon.com/tophn-a-fun-side-project-built-with-vue-js- and-rethinkdb-f22159641c1b)

</comment><comment><USER19> I find this meta HN site quite entertaining:

[http://n-gate.com](http://n-gate.com)

<comment><USER33> I found the about section there very useful since I always wondered what hn was about:

> Hacker News is an echo chamber focusing on computer posturing and self- > aggrandizement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> RSS dumped into a feed reader ([https://feedbin.com/](https://feedbin.com/)) is what works best for me. I can quickly scan missed headlines, read what I'm interested in, star what I want to keep, and mark everything else as read. Reeder on iOS works extremely well for accessing the Feedbin account on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'd like to see some kind of filtering for HN based upon some preferences or, better yet, an ML style system like with Netflix that learns the kinds of stories you're interested in.

I skimmed through the descriptions of the "21 better ways", but didn't see anything that would help you to find the HN articles that you're interested in.

</comment><comment><USER36> Years ago I took a stab at writing my own reader with the goal of looking at the top HN stories over the past 24 hours since I'm not one that checks HN every few minutes. Pretty limited use but surprisingly still works: [https://yahnr.dangoldin.com/](https://yahnr.dangoldin.com/)

</comment><comment><USER37> For the longest time I wanted something that generates an offline copy of top-X articles with their best comments. For the no-data/wifi train, plane, etc. Article would be a bonus, but I often check the discussion first :-)

The only offline offering on that list does it for articles, but not for comments. So, right axis, wrong direction for me.

</comment><comment><USER38> Don't forget HN over Gopher: gopher://hngopher.com:70/

<comment><USER38> I see this triggered a post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15313838](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15313838)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Ok, so all of those are for reading, but I don't see any that would allow _voting and commenting_ on HN. It's also the case with pretty much all other HN apps/interfaces I've seen (with notable exception of HN Enhancement Suite, which is a browser extension).

I don't understand why that is. Is there some important rule of HN that disallows any third-party interaction except through the official interface? Or do people simply treat viewing HN as a MVP, and give up after making it?

As it is, those tools seem only useful for HN readers / lurkers, not that much for those of us who participate in discussions here.

<comment><USER40> There is no proper API, IIRC. All those clients scrape the website.

<comment><USER39> There is (or at least was) an API, AFAIK read-only though. I still don't see why one couldn't combine the API and scrapping to get a full read/write interface going.

<comment><USER41> Wouldn't that require you to give a random site your login to post on your behalf?

<comment><USER39> It would. Whether you should is another thing entirely. I'm asking why noone seems to even offer the option?

<comment><USER41> I can't speak for anyone else, but if it were me, I wouldn't expect anyone to trust me enough to use it, so why bother?

<comment><USER42> People likely would use it. It's a HN account, not a bank account.

<comment><USER41> Yes, but they shouldn't.

Even though I have no ill intent and it's just an account on a silly web forum, they shouldn't and it would make me sad if they did.

<comment><USER39> Some of those are apps. Apps should be fine to use those accounts, as they should _not_ contact anything else than HN and HN's API.

But I guess the only way to be sure is to write one yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> 1 vote for HackerWeb for your phone. Wish the full HN had collapsible threads - a feature on Reddit I find very useful for traversing long threads without getting "sucked" into a "reply black hole"

<comment><USER44> They seem to have added this feature to the main site within the last couple months. It works for me on my iPad anyway, maybe give it another try.

<comment><USER8> July 2016 :)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675)

<comment><USER43> Ouch - I guess I never expected to see it there!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The only improvement I'd like for the current web page is that on mobile you have to zoom to vote. If the up and down votes were at separate ends of the item header that would make it more usable

</comment><comment><USER46> I use hckrnews.com together with Stylish (extension) dark theme ([https://userstyles.org/styles/117803/dark- hckrnews-2017](https://userstyles.org/styles/117803/dark-hckrnews-2017)). I also use a dark theme for Hacker News ([https://userstyles.org/styles/113994/hacker-news- dark](https://userstyles.org/styles/113994/hacker-news-dark)).

For me it is much easier on the eyes.

<comment><USER47> How safe is it to use something like Stylish?

<comment><USER46> Depends on how much do you trust browser extensions. From my knowledge every extension code can be inspected and read unless the code is obfuscated. The styles are written in CSS (only a few lines) and injected into the website. So you can quickly review it.

If you want to be extra cautious you could write your own extension to be safer, but I trust it good enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> HN with thumbnails: [https://hnews.xyz/](https://hnews.xyz/)

This is specially useful on phones.

<comment><USER41> That's nice, but the thumbnails appear to be of the site layouts, rather than thumbnail metadata, which would seem to make them less than useful since it's not contextually relevant. Most of what's visible is the header of the page (which is repeated in the link) and some thumbnails are even blank.

That said, having tried to make a HN clone that did use metadata for thumbnails, even that seemed not to add value in most cases. Turning a URL into a useful thumbnail seems to be kind of a hard problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I think the best way is how HN is. In fact, I wish more websites had this text only approach. Came across this fantastic redesign of a conceptual text-only TechCrunch: [https://hackernoon.com/redesigning- techcrunch-1ecae542e6af](https://hackernoon.com/redesigning- techcrunch-1ecae542e6af)

Somebody please make that!

</comment><comment><USER50> I've used hn.premii.com for years and couldn't be happier. I also like the name, it means 'prizes' in Romanian.

<comment><USER51> Seconded! Been using it forever, if he'd implement replying and voting I'd have no reason to ever use the vanilla site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> The best way to read HN for me is no browser, 2 mails, one in the morning, one in the afternoon I use a custom version of this python script. (since I have a big tendency to procrastinate)

[https://github.com/lrusnac/hn-notifier](https://github.com/lrusnac/hn- notifier)

</comment><comment><USER53> I find the original HN site easy enough to read, as long as I have the following Greasemonkey script active:

// ==UserScript== // @name Hacker News Readability (small width) // @description Reduces the width on Hacker News to make it easier to read // @include [http://news.ycombinator.com/*](http://news.ycombinator.com/*) // @include [https://news.ycombinator.com/*](https://news.ycombinator.com/*) // @grant none // ==/UserScript==

GM_addStyle(".default { width: 650px !important; }");

Having the width reduced makes reading much quicker, since you don't have to scan such a long line of text. I would encourage everyone to try it.

</comment><comment><USER54> I've been using HN Special Chrome extension since it was released. Can't go back to the standard look. [http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/hn- special/](http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/hn-special/)

</comment><comment><USER55> A visualization of the front page: [https://www.sizzleanalytics.com/HackerNews](https://www.sizzleanalytics.com/HackerNews) Easily see "hot stories", and how stories relate to each other.

</comment><comment><USER56> Does anyone know of a hacker news viewer that can sort an article's comments chronologically or on another criteria?

My only gripe with the default site is that there is no way to quickly locate the most recent comments on an article.

<comment><USER57> My hack is to "find on page" "minutes ago" , at least it gets me the last hour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Aren't derivative posts of hacker news derivatives a bit derivative?

</comment><comment><USER59> I prefer the version of Hacker News from four months ago to the current version, and all of the viewers listed here, even on mobile. I wouldn't think my opinion would be niche.

<comment><USER60> What changed four months ago? I didn't notice any change.

<comment><USER59> Weird stuff like collapsing downvoted comments (and their replies) by default. I even browse with showdead on, so I don't want to have to manually expand comment trees just because slightly more people disagree than agree with the point being made.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I want one with a big hide button for posts/comments and anonymous comments.

I don't need to vote or something, I just want to get rid of uninteresting stuff as fast as easy as possible.

<comment><USER28> There are anonymous comments?

<comment><USER41> "anonymous" meaning posting through an alt account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> my small lame userscript (usable with tampermonkey) to color new stories/comments and keep track of new unread comments in articles I was interested in. Lets me skim /news quicker removing annoying "I already read that one" mental load.

[https://github.com/raszpl/hackahackernews](https://github.com/raszpl/hackahackernews)

</comment><comment><USER62> If anyone uses Calibre, here is a Calibre HN recipe I have made. It looks pretty good on Kindle Paperwhite, but I have not tested it anywhere else:

[https://github.com/brendoncrawford- org/calibre_recipes/blob/...](https://github.com/brendoncrawford- org/calibre_recipes/blob/master/recipes/hackernews.recipe)

</comment><comment><USER63> I like hackernews.el[0], but haxor-new[1], mentioned below, sounds even more awesome.

[0] [https://github.com/clarete/hackernews.el](https://github.com/clarete/hackernews.el)

[1] [https://github.com/donnemartin/haxor- news](https://github.com/donnemartin/haxor-news)

</comment><comment><USER64> I use inoreader so there's no reason to use these, only thing I'd like to see improved with RSS would be to update less often (like that it would took 2hrs to update) and in that time it would get decided if it gets included or not (so that there's no flagged, dupes or when title changes multiple times it would not show up multiple times).

</comment><comment><USER65> I'll continue with news.ycombinator.com, but with styling from the Stylish extension for chrome. Currently using this theme: [https://userstyles.org/styles/107079/hacker-news-minimal- the...](https://userstyles.org/styles/107079/hacker-news-minimal-theme)

</comment><comment><USER66> Chrome > [https://theoldreader.com](https://theoldreader.com) > RSS

Nothing beats it. Personally I like the waterhose approach and select what (comments, always first the comments) I want to read.

No filtering, no weighting, no colours just plain text together with all the other sites I follow via RSS.

</comment><comment><USER67> I use the telegram channel of hacker news' top posts of the day with more than 100+ scores ( [https://telegram.me/hacker_news_feed](https://telegram.me/hacker_news_feed) )and also the hooks bot (@hooks_bot) in telegram which shows posts with 200+ score..

<comment><USER11> As mentioned in the article, there is also a 100+ score Twitter account: [https://twitter.com/newsyc100](https://twitter.com/newsyc100) which has sibling accounts for other score limits.

Not related but still worth a mention due to apparently considering coming out of retirement after a year's hiatus: [https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says](https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says)

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I made and use a userstyle theme: [https://userstyles.org/styles/71445/better- hacker-news-desig...](https://userstyles.org/styles/71445/better-hacker-news- design). Not a big rework, just a bit brighter and bigger and more readable.

</comment><comment><USER69> I use [https://hckrnews.com/](https://hckrnews.com/) since I can sort out top 10 or 20 and top 50% (my usual default) or hit all to see everything as it updates. It also keeps track of dates and when, on all, what's new since my last visit.

</comment><comment><USER70> No love for Hacker News Enhancement Suite? [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- enhanc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER71> I also made native macOS HN client app called MackerNews. It renders the article in a web view (readable if possible) but everything else is native. Btw its a client, you can login, vote, comment, etc :) [http://mackernews.com](http://mackernews.com)

</comment><comment><USER72> My favorite way of reading HN is with this dark theme:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker- news-n...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-night- mode)

It's all I need.

<comment><USER73> Also: [https://userstyles.org/styles/browse?category=ycombinator](https://userstyles.org/styles/browse?category=ycombinator)

<comment><USER72> This is great, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> SG- I would have liked to see widgets and small apps or things instead of just mostly sites. The responsive ones for mobile are nice and I use [http://hn.reapp.io](http://hn.reapp.io) myself on my phone.

</comment><comment><USER74> Does anyone remember the front-end to HN that categorizes posts according to proper topic categories like "Privacy," "Coding," "Startups," etc. with ML?

I remember it being posted or mentioned in a comment but cannot find where it is.

</comment><comment><USER75> I'm kind of surprised that there weren't any console-based readers listed.

</comment><comment><USER76> The only think [https://news.ycombinator.com](https://news.ycombinator.com) is missing to be perfect is the search functionality, I don't like to rely on hn.algolia.com.

</comment><comment><USER77> #22 [https://www.juptr.io/#home/@!news.ycombinator.com/rss](https://www.juptr.io/#home/@!news.ycombinator.com/rss)

<comment><USER78> Yes, I use feedly to read the rss and it's fairly easy to quickly parse the whole feed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> For those who use telegram I've created this channel: [https://t.me/hacker_news_feed](https://t.me/hacker_news_feed)

</comment><comment><USER80> The scroll to anchor on touch start is super annoying on the top 21 list. I can't scroll the page in that section without accidentally jumping to another page anchor.

</comment><comment><USER81> [http://www.pxlet.com](http://www.pxlet.com) should be in the list as well. It provides a hub for tech news.

</comment><comment><USER82> Only thing I think ought to be improved is that readers ought to earn access to the new top rankings by reading and ranking at least a few new articles

</comment><comment><USER83> I'd like to see categories, and being able to subscribe to them.

Alternatively, what I'd like to filter out of HN:

\- People pushing their products

\- Useless artistic projects

\- CSS hacks

\- Ways to make money without much effort

</comment><comment><USER84> Critically missing is Webshit Weekly: [http://n-gate.com/](http://n-gate.com/)

</comment><comment><USER85> I prefer HN filtered with Machine Learning:

[http://hn.njl.us/](http://hn.njl.us/)

</comment><comment><USER86> taggernews.com allows you to see what tags might apply to each story (more info about all of this at [https://devpost.com/software/tagger- news](https://devpost.com/software/tagger-news))

</comment><comment><USER87> Related: Do you use any native apps on mobile (preferably iOS)?

</comment><comment><USER88> Materialistic on Android is particularly good.

</comment><comment><USER89> hnews.xyz - scans quickly, avoids comments, leaves, ftw.

</comment><comment><USER90> You've been reading Hacker News wrong your whole life.

<comment><USER91> They don't want you to know the secret to reading HN!

On a more serious note, I'm pretty happy with seeing it right here on this very domain. Hell, I haven't even changed the orange header.

The layout and navigation are simple but intuitive. The site is very light and loads quickly. I don't like how voting will make me jump around the page, but I can live with that. No site is perfect for everyone, after all.

Yeah, I think I'll just keep reading it right here.

<comment><USER39> > _voting will make me jump around the page_

What do you mean by that? Voting is handled by AJAX requests, so it shouldn't jump around.

<comment><USER91> Comment, then vote, and it brings me back to my comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> hackurls.com

</comment><comment><USER93> I struggle to see why anyone would want to dilute Hacker News with the affect- laden decadence of contemporary web design.

I am a visual artist and this is sincere.

My hopes are that the HN community holds stable at least until I can find a new hole to run to.

<comment><USER94> It should have been titled "other ways to read hacker news".

<comment><USER8> Ok, we'll s/Better/Other/ above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> I always access HN by hckrnews.com . It's much easier to look at the top posts for the day. And since it also has the top posts from previous days, I don't feel the need to check the front page as often.</comment>


Corona Confessional: New Podcast Launching - <AUTHOR> The past few months have been hard. There are a lot of new rules for how we're supposed to live our lives. And not all of them have been easy. We've broken the rules. We know you have, too. On the upcoming podcast, Corona Confessional we recognize we're all sinners and want to give you an opportunity to get things off your chest. Send us a voicemail with your corona confession. Go to an underground party? Hoard masks? Have a frisky first date? Everything hurts right now, but this will make you feel better. All calls are anonymous.
To leave a voicemail call: (415) 942-2795
Or send a voice memo to this email: email@example.com <comment><AUTHOR> [https://twitter.com/covidsins](https://twitter.com/covidsins)</comment>


CoffeeStrap HN - <AUTHOR> http://boards.coffeestrap.com/#/HN <comment><USER2> "HI HN, WE ARE BUILDING TINDER, BUT FOR LANGUAGE EDUCATION, WITH INSTITUTIONAL CERTIFICATION.

WE'RE TESTING IT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VENICE, AND WE'D LOVE NOW TO DO THIS ON HN AS WELL.

YOU THINK THAT'S A BAD IDEA, WHICH DOESN'T SOLVE A REAL PROBLEM? LET US KNOW WHY."

Your first paragraph is not informative at all. What if I don't know what Tinder is? You're suggesting that maybe your idea is bad (and we should tell you why) about 1/2 a screen before telling me what your idea actually _is_. How about putting that sentence "CoffeeStrap is a place..." right at the top?

p.s. I think your idea is great! But I need more help understanding what's going on :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Good critique, we just took for granted that the average HN user knows what Tinder is. We're basically trying to figure out how to replicate real world interaction between members belonging to different communities, but online. How we're doing it, well, we're still experimenting. :-)

<comment><USER3> If the average HN reader knows what Tinder is, that could mean that 51% know and 49% don't know. Never ignore the 49%. :-)

Definitely agree about the "YOU THINK THAT'S A BAD IDEA" language. Besides being negative, it puts words in people's mouths, which is very off-putting.

Your project sounds neat, though. Best of luck with it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the HN-specific landing page is not as informative as the actual main page: [http://boards.coffeestrap.com/#/welcome](http://boards.coffeestrap.com/#/welcome)

The HN-specific page reads like startup satire.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not, we're trying to put together people with different backgrounds, and different approaches to langauge. We started from the two context we were most familiar with. The line between what is satire and what is community culture may be kind of thin, especially for online communities such as HN. Don't you think? :-)

<comment><USER5> Other than hacker news, how many other targeted landing pages have you created? (just for my own curiosity)

<comment><USER6> Another one for the University of Venice (Ca' Foscari) that we proposed to students/ex-students last week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Every time I hear the name, I have to re-remind myself that it isn't bootstrap rewritten in coffeescript.

<comment><USER8> Same. And the Try CoffeeStrap button doesn't help.

<comment><AUTHOR> Original concept was "Bootstrap your language with Coffee" :-).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe I'll get lucky and there'll be some folks willing to teach me Danish. There are surprisingly few good options for learning it in the US.

I like Duolingo's approach, but they don't have the languages I want available (except German).

Edit: Bummer. No Danish. :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! We're testing it out on a small subset of languages. Being it a peer2peer marketplace tool, we don't plan to restrict the amount of languages that will be included. Going to notify you as soon as Danish will be up! :-)

<comment><USER9> Kickass, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You really need to improve the design of that website.

<comment><USER11> I like the design. What do you see as problems?

<comment><USER10> 1\. Line-height needs to be increased as lines are almost touching.

2\. Colour scheme is terrible: green, orange, grey, pale yellow, orange on dark blue, dark blue text with orange shadow, green text on black terminal style popups, black text on asphalt texture, light blue boxes with grey text and dark blue headers, dark red footer with coffee table.

3\. Lack of distinction between what is uppercase and what is lowercase. (And in general, just don't do uppercase like that as it's hard to read.)

4\. Long-winded copy.

5\. "Let Us Know Why" takes me to a team page. On the bottom is what looks like a gigantic back button. Where does the so-called back button go? Not back to the page which I was before I can tell you that. If it's a call-to-action it should be clear what it does.

6\. Weird branding in the copy: text that jumps in between trying to appear professional/startupy and wanting to share a beer with you.

7\. I just found a whole new introduction page: [http://boards.coffeestrap.com/#/welcome](http://boards.coffeestrap.com/#/welcome) I am so confused why more than one exists?

For starters. Realistically they need to work with a designer and start focusing on simplicity.

<comment><USER12> +1 I couldn't agree more that design needs to be improved.

1\. Work on forms: they should be easy to distinguish from other "blocky" things around.

2\. It took me like 2 minutes to find what your project is about. Improve your landing page.

3\. Colour scheme is really messy. Pick 2 base colors and extend them using [http://kuler.adobe.com](http://kuler.adobe.com)

4\. Choice of name - I believe that in hacker community CoffeeStrap really sounds like Bootstrap in CoffeeScript

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The name and first sentence on your site made me think this was satire.

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady Nice idea and I could see myself using it. I currently use Duolingo but this seems like it would complement that nicely. I would suggest changing the name though. As a dev I immediately thought Bootstrap in CoffeeScript. As a regular person I don't think I'd have a clue what something called CoffeeStrap would do other than something related to coffee.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm receiving a bunch of errors when trying to sign up. Seems to be related to the following:

      XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://api.coffeestrap.com/api/v1/users/xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. Origin 'http://boards.coffeestrap.com' is therefore not allowed access.

The site also tends to go into 404 redirect loops which eventually crash the tab. Not sure if that's related to the above. This is happening loading [http://boards.coffeestrap.com/](http://boards.coffeestrap.com/) in an incognito tab.

Also, don't see Thai as a language. :(

<comment><USER6> I guess this is because it's a bit overloaded the website! Thanks for the heads up, looking into!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cools stuff, it seems like you guys made quite a jump from the previous version of the platform! Looks cooler now. How do you handle the video chat? Local plugin or external service?

<comment><USER6> Hey thanks! We are pouring a lot of efforts, we are improving day after day! The video chat is on a isolate instance of heroku. We used a nodejs app with webrtc stuff!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So how are you going to succeed where Livemocha failed for instance ? To be frank , I liked Livemocha,too bad they couldnt monetize their application without selling out to someone that doesnt care about users.

<comment><USER17> I take it you mean Rosetta Stone? All emails I get now from Livemocha are pitching them. The thing is it actually works. Hell just from the demo CD years ago I can still say "The horse is white" in Welsh!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Are you planning to partner with other universities in Italy only or you want to spread this idea across europe either?

<comment><USER6> The Ca' Foscari one (university of Venice) was a pilot that we launched last week. The cool think about that is that we are able to automatically certify people that comes from Ca' Foscari. We are planning to have a 'karma' style reference that goes up based on languages certifications, institutions in which you studied and so on.

So definitely yes, we want to repeat that for other Institutions as well.

<comment><USER19> FYI, your "The Team" link in the page footer seems to be broken (links to [http://boards.coffeestrap.com/team](http://boards.coffeestrap.com/team))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Have you guys ever considered getting EU funding? There's always some grants to be had with projects like these.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why must i upload a picture. Use my gravatar.</comment>


The Once and Future Visual Programming Environment - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/27/hey-kids-get-off-my-lawn-the-once-and-future-visual-programming-environment/ <comment><USER4> The biggest problem I have with tools like Visual Age and XCode is they want to replace my tool chain. I want it to tie into my tool chain comfortably (I really hope Emacsy[1] succeeds; I would contribute time to that project!).

As I look at Light Table, I really hope they learn a LOT from Emacs:

• Editing is not secondary. In many IDEs, it feels like actually writing code is an afterthought.

• Mice suck[2].

• Allow me to integrate external tools easily.

• Make _everything_ easily customizable and replaceable.

1\. [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/568774734/emacsy-an- embe...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/568774734/emacsy-an-embeddable- emacs)

2\. They are fine for detail-oriented, fine-motor-control work. _Coding_ is not one of those.

<comment><USER5> _Mice suck[2]._

 _2\. They are fine for detail-oriented, fine-motor-control work. Coding is not one of those._

As someone who has written tens of thousands of lines of code with _only_ a mouse, I would modify this statement to "Mice suck when you are primarily using a keyboard." Editing code _is_ detail-oriented, fine-motor-control work, and in my experience a mouse is better than a touch screen for editing (with current interfaces), and worse for typing code in. I have not done any coding with a keyboard for many years, so I can't directly compare, but I think mouse, with my custom typing system, is easier for many situations. The problems come when you are using both mouse and keyboard.

<comment><USER4> I, too, would be interested to hear more as I'm having difficulty picturing what you mean. My mental picture is "iPad with a mouse", but there is obviously something missing. I'm dubious of the ability to code at least as efficiently with no keyboard as with, but that may be my lack of imagination.

<comment><USER5> The thing about coding is there's lots of thinking. I can write code efficiently because after a point, raw typing speed is not very important. I'm much less efficient at, say, copying out prose that's already written (unless my prediction engine is familiar with it...).

My software is like an on-screen keyboard with context-sensitive prediction, more sensible orientation and layout, and lots of shortcuts overloaded on the buttons, operated by the other mouse buttons and the scroll-wheel. So, for example, moving a word/page at a time, selecting lines/files, unindenting, etc. are just done by scrolling in the right place, control-A is middle- clicking A, and so on (the program just sends the appropriate keystrokes to make things happen). Selecting and toolbars/menus are fast because you're already using the mouse, and copy and paste is just select and middle click on Linux.

RSI basically forced me to develop the system (I can't use a physical keyboard, and no existing software was or is good enough), and I have been using it for all my typing since 2003. I'm now working on making a commercial version aimed primarily at touch screens (gestures will replace different mouse buttons).

<comment><USER6> Screenshots and more information would be very nice!

<comment><USER5> As far as looks go it's as you'd expect, a grid of letter and symbol buttons, and a list of predictions. I don't think it's a good idea to disclose the few interesting features until I have something on sale (right now they're a competitive advantage), so sorry, no screenshots :-P

I'm not sure that there's much more to it than what I've already described. I think what it's got going for it is refinement driven by nine years of dogfooding day in day out, and that refinement isn't easy to describe as it's just many tiny little choices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This struck me:

 _Third, screen real estate matters. The traditional "everything is a file" approach is wonderfully portable. You can build an environment for working with files even for a very small display. Heck, you can work with files if all you have is a line-mode terminal. But flexibly arranged code snippets and fully interactive graphical debuggers require a lot of pixels._

I'd go even further. Programming requires a lot of pixels. You want to look at as much code as possible no matter what. Maybe a 10' x 10' screen would be enough but otherwise, there's no limit to what I want _for myself_ , not for some GUI eye-candy. As another post says _Editing is not secondary_ but for me its a matter of never, ever crowding my precious screen real estate, ever.

But by that token, anytime someone tells you their application needs lots of screen real estate is a time when they're admitting they'll waste that real estate doing something I don't care about.

<comment><USER8> I wonder if that really is the case? Are there any useful experiments done comparing screen size?

I would have two questions:

1) how much screen size is ideal? 2) are there better ways to deal with information display than large screens?

I use laptops a lot. I have used 17" laptops and now I have a small one. I don't feel that productive on the small screen. That's subjective.

I use an external screen. A 30" screen. Am I more productive? On larger screens my main field of view is not much larger. I have to move the head to see things at the edges.

One thing which might be more productive is instant switching between contexts on the screen. For example switching between a debugger view and an editing sessions easily and fast. That might be better on a certain screen size, than having both the debug and edit version on the same screen - but each smaller. Sometimes programmers add another monitor, so they can put these things on different monitors. But is it really better to look to another monitor, instead of just switching the context on the one you are currently looking at?

<comment><USER7> You know, I really don't know whether more screen space makes you more productive. I actually suspect that question matter less than you'd think in terms of the question at hand (whether "visual" workspace will be accepted by programmers).

I was simply saying that I and I suspect many typical programmers _want_ this screen space and will become annoyed at programs which stand against it. IE, put a widget between me and the data I really want and you'll soon see me not using your application. Will this preference make me more or less productive? That's a further question.

On the other hand, I happen to think a second monitor is a great recipe for disabling neck injuries. But that is my rather particular view based on my studies of effective and ineffective postures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On the other hand, is it possible that the slew of visually-driven programming environments we've seen in the last 30 years or so, running the gamut from Visual Age to Rational Rose, were novel, innovative, and helpful in many ways, but ultimately just not as effective as a coder that knows what she's doing with a lightweight editor and increasingly speedy runtimes on faster and faster CPUs?

<comment><USER7> That's possible.

But "why" is the sixty-four dollar question.

I think it is reasonable to say these environments gave some programmers the information _they thought they needed_. But the bare text was more useful. Text and GUI dook-hickies are both pixel-based information. What makes one superior to the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is interesting:

 _the closest anyone has ever gotten to creating a full dynamic environment for a C-language platform is Alexia Massalin's Synthesis operating system. If you are a programmer of any kind, I'll wager that Alexia's dissertation will blow your mind_

There have to be people on HN who know about this. Tell us more!

Wikipedia [1] says that the Synthesis kernel relied heavily on self-modifying code and that adoption of its techniques was inhibited by its being written in assembly language. That makes sense; it probably relied on the code=data aspect of assembly language, something that (Forth aside) you mostly don't get back until you've left the lower levels well behind.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_kernel#Massalin.27s_S...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_kernel#Massalin.27s_Synthesis_kernel)

<comment><USER11> He wrote special assembly language templates that allowed constant propagation, constant folding and code inlining at run time quickly (at a time when state of the art machines ran around 33MHz to 50MHz).

The actual thesis _is_ mindblowing (I'm currently reading it now). Not only does it create kernel syscalls on the fly, but specialized interrupt handlers that handle only the devices required (if a new device requires an interrupt handler because it's being used, a new interrupt handler with the existing code and the new code is generated).

The generalized system call (TRAP #15, since his machine used the Motorola 68030) was fast, but a user-mode program could designate up to fifteen system calls (per thread) to be called directly via TRAP #0 to TRAP #14. The end result---a system call was about twice as expensive as a native subroutine call (whereas in contemporary Unix systems it was more like 40x-100x times as expensive).

Another reason why the technique of run-time code generation isn't used that much (and is mentioned in the thesis) is that instruction caches are hideously expensive to flush.

But given stuff like TCCBoot (<http://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html>) I think this could be a viable approach to kernels.

(Edit---grammar)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article has a host of interesting points and references which are great to read, but the one-upmanship of 'its probably been done before' (which seems omnipresent when discussing visual programming) really annoys me, because the upshot of it is to discourage anyone who is interested in this kind of work from pursuing it.

My point is that whilst lots of ideas have been tested before, what hasn't been 'done' is a a visual programming environment that really takes off. And when/if that happens, it will be worth more than 1000 well written research papers and PARC prototypes, and its creators will deserve more success than 1000 academics who have tested some idea (or merely seen someone else try) but never seen it through to widespread adoption....

<comment><USER13> I came away from it with a very different message: This has been tried many times before, by teams of brilliant people, and _you can still find their notes_.

Half the problem is that every N years, people bravely try it again...and start from zero, because they didn't do much research. History is full of great ideas that didn't take off because computers weren't fast enough, because touchscreens weren't popular yet, because wireless didn't exist, etc. They often used different names, but there are many brilliant ideas waiting for another dance.

<comment><USER12> Yes, the article is supportive of new work (like lighttable), but its still very heavy on "we've done it before". The title "Hey Kids, Get Off My Lawn", and the closing sentence "when that new thing comes along, I'll tell you we built an early version of it at the Media Lab..." pretty much sum up this sentiment that irks me.

<comment><USER14> if you're interested in visual programming environments and try to look up prior efforts at all, you WILL find this sentiment to be true. It's somewhat depressing actually. You'll not just find all these cool sounding environments from the 80s that seemed light years ahead of today (or even something like Light Table), but you'll also find studies on the difficulties people faced with them and why they failed.

Text is not an easy thing to dislodge from the programmer's toolset.

My personal opinion keeps switching between "Text is basic and elemental, so it's the most natural way to represent code and therefore is the preferred" and "We havent built tools good enough or representations revolutionary enough (or scalable enough) and that's why text remains preferred".

I can see how someone who's built a non-textual programming environment can come to a "been there, done that" kind of attitude. Just take his enthusiasm at new attempts at the problem as a more pertinent response and ignore the rest.

<comment><USER13> Another example: APL used a bunch of mnemonic symbols for operators -- for example, the "reverse" operator is a circle with a vertical line through it. Mirror image. This made sense back in 1962, with Mad Men-era Selectric typewriters* , but it never sat comfortably with ASCII. Very dense, expressive code. Like thinking in kanji, after a lifetime of alphabetic hackery.

* <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectric>

The idea has many things going for it, and is worth another go in the era of touchpads and graphic interfaces. APL has always had a die-hard following, and intriguing ASCII offshoots such as J and K, but it's time for a second chance.

The APLs have many other interesting aspects (they're all about data- parallelism and functional programming of a different flavor than Lisp and Haskell), but to my knowledge nobody has sincerely retried the glyph-based language thing again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There are plenty of Visual Programming paradigms in development today. The XCode Interface Builder, and Visual Studio's stuff as well, handle the tricky layout and placements before it is converted to text for the compiler. But the rest of the development is done through purely textual coding as the visual paradigm becomes exponentially more difficult to manage as the project "grows". So what happens is a hybrid.

<comment><USER16> The tools mentioned have very little with GUI design and a lot with being able to explore and modify the whole system - not just the program - <USER2> everything runs.

Do the Squeak by Example tutorial and come back when you finish it.

<comment><USER15> No. ;)

Edit: I just got down voted for replying "No." to a comment on HN. Hah! That's this site in a nutshell for you.

<comment><USER16> I think it's a matter of attitude. Your response didn't add anything to the discussion, you seemed to refuse perfectly valid advice (by your message, you didn't read - or understand - the original article and the advice I gave you, while given in a more than a little condescending tone - sorry for that - would enlighten you) and people around here don't really welcome that.

I regard it as a feature rather than a bug.

<comment><USER15> > Do the (thing above) and come back when you finish it.

Do you even know what advice(1) is? That's not advice as I understand it. That's an order. You're giving orders to a complete strange on a web forum. Think about the intelligence behind that for a second.

My comment on this site was referencing the comment by Paul Topping(2) on the TC link. His opinion, and one I agree with, is that Visual Languages become too cumbersome for anything but small projects, and my example is using Visual Programming for layout. The XIB's are XML in XCode.

1) <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/advice>

2) [http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/27/hey-kids-get-off-my-lawn- th...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/27/hey-kids-get-off-my-lawn-the-once-and- future-visual-programming- environment/?fb_comment_id=fbc_10150970512922349_23586927_10150971473562349)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd be interested to hear, from people who have experience with these older systems, why they didn't take off.

Maybe it's that they were developed almost pre-web? I was using the web in 1994 on windows 3.1 but certainly never heard of smalltalk. I think it must have been the Microsoft ecosystem and then later the Linux ecosystem that kept "better" tools in the shadows. In 1994 windows was a fantastic upgrade from DOS. You could not just have multiple windows, but multitask!

These days it seems like programming platforms like node.js can take off astonishingly quickly because of faster and faster dissemination on the web. It's not just more adoption, but more contribution too.

<comment><USER18> Execution. Execution. Execution.

Really. Ideas are 1% of the work. Doing the idea is 9%. Doing it well is the other 90%. Different things matter every time, that's what makes it so hard.

<comment><USER19> And the missing 'other' 100% is getting anyone to take notice!

One can have the most wonderful, state-of-the-art, mature product - <USER3> remains largely unknown by the 'majority' because... well, _why_?? I still can't figure out this last bit...

(Modern Smalltalk is, unfortunately, a perfect example of this.)

<comment><USER18> I toss the "take notice" into the execution pile. That's why it's 90% of the work. That includes understanding why brands fail regardless of the quality of the good or service. It includes understanding the pains of your userbase, the expectations they have going in, and what you have to do in order for them to converge and spread your technology in an organic manner.

It is the holistic picture that constitutes success. That's the "other 90%" and it's a black art.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Sandy_Klausner</comment>


Dennard Scaling Demise Puts Permanent Dent in Supercomputing (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/06/18/dennard-scaling-demise-puts-permanent-dent-in-supercomputing/ <comment><USER2> At the lower end of the top 500, you also have to consider all the companies that have moved to the cloud, especially for burst computing. You have a cluster in house of the size that you see roughly as 100% utilized 24/7 and scale out to the cloud for the Burnett aspects of your workload. I've seen several companies put this in place.

(Side note is the first AWS cluster to make top 500 [https://www.top500.org/system/179693](https://www.top500.org/system/179693) )</comment>