Ask HN: Use app first, register later - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for web applications that users can use without registration, just by visiting the site, and make you register later after you spent some time. Any good examples? <comment><USER2> Hi. My webapp is a good example. It's <http://www.SignAppNow.com> \- a simple and easy way to create sign up sheet. You can immediately use it without registering and there is no limit to the number of sign up sheets you can create. If you want features like editing your sign up sheets, custom url, and so on, that's the time you can register. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://pluspanda.com>

Just click on the big green button. A real account is created. If you don't claim it, it gets deleted. Pretty simple, and nearly everyone who is vaguely interested always clicks on the green button...

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure if this meets your criterion, but StackOverflow does not require registration but it is more beneficial to do so: <http://www.stackoverflow.com>

</comment><comment><USER5> My startup Feedity allows that - <http://feedity.com>

Try first, register later to save your work.</comment>


Most types of cancer not due to "bad luck" [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2015/pdfs/pr231_E.pdf <comment><USER3> This document is both a political document and, to a lesser extent, a scientific one.

On the political front, the document encourages people to reject that cancer predilection is stochastic and to encourage the continued study of cancer.

The scientific component attempts to provide an underpinning to the political goal. It uses a handful of epidemiological examples, such as the climbing incidence of colorectal cancer in Japan over a genetically-insignificant timescale (which suggests an environmental factor at play).

The article fails to support its headline ('Most types of cancer not due to "bad luck"') through any scientific instrument. While its policy goal (the continued pursuit of the causes of cancer) is reasonable, nobody is saying that we now know that cancer is predominantly caused by bad luck so we should stop studying it (certainly not Vogelstein, whose career is built on the study of cancer).

Overall, it's not clear to me why this was published.

<comment><USER4> The cancer research and cancer epidemiology communities do not really talk to each other (as a cancer researcher for many years I have never been to an epidemiology seminar despite working in a 'cancer center'). So it is really a fight for money and mind influence. Most cancer researchers lean towards drugs targeting molecular mechanisms of cancer, cancer epidemiologists, on the other hand, aim for political decisions that combat environmental factors. Where should most money go? what should be discussed in the media?

Vogelstein proposes a simple model that explains a lot of data. Sure, the implications are bleak, but the scientists I talked to were not really surprised that it finally got out.

<comment><USER5> >> as a cancer researcher...

Iodine. Have you looked into it? The abstracts over on nih.gov are pretty interesting - google for "iodine cancer nih" without quotes. I'm curious what a cancer researcher has to say. Mostly I'm interested in weather your peer group has even looked at this.

<comment><USER4> > your peer group has even looked at this.

I think it will help most if I explain the incentives for scientists (at least in the US). From their first day in the lab scientists are rewarded most for generating data and making discoveries. The more novel and paradigm shifting the discovery the better - as it opens the door to high-impact publications and future research money. But "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and the more unexpected the finding the more difficult it is to convince your peers and get it published.

Somewhat idealistically, this has two consequences for a good lead scientist: 1) hew will guide his lab to explore the unexplored 2) and subject the most novel and promising findings to the most stringent experimental verification.

So the answer to your direct question - yes probably someone somewhere tried to test the iodine-breast cancer hypothesis, but since it is not a major topic in breast cancer research the experiments have probably failed and were not published and thus independently replicated

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This shows a severe misunderstanding of statistics.

The original paper (here: [http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6217/78.abstract](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6217/78.abstract) \-- the abstract is enough to deduce the conclusion) is a simple statistical analysis of mutation probability in certain cell types. It's basically saying that many cancers are not necessarily influenced by external factors and can be predicted by nothing more than the number of cell divisions and the probability of DNA mutation compounded.

That, in itself, is a _fascinating_ scientific result. Arguing against the statistics here is probably not a good idea, unless there was a serious error in the math or an order of magnitude error in the probability of mutation. Certainly there are other possibilities of error in the data or methodology.

But the article in opposition (OP) is doing something odd that doesn't appear to be a scientific argument: it's railing against the language and the implications of the very concept of statistical analysis applied to the problem. It's assuming that because we discovered that, perhaps, cancer has a certain probability of occurring independent of external factors, that it will somehow slow research or cause us to throw up our hands and give up on prevention strategies or research.

I don't think that's the case. Rather than understanding the absolutely fascinating statistical analysis here, the OP article comes across as reactionary and unscientific.

Assuming the data is sound, the statistical analysis is profound. Most often, statistics such as that are profoundly misunderstood as well: people have an incredible capacity for attribution bias and data disbelief. This simply underscores the need for a better education in basic statistics as well as science across the board.

<comment><USER7> A specific critique raised in the press release from IARC is that the study has an

"emphasis on very rare cancers (e.g. osteosarcoma, medulloblastoma) that together make only a small contribution to the total cancer burden."

and that it

"excludes [...] common cancers for which incidence differs substantially between populations and over time."

So it sounds like the generalization hinted at in the abstract shows a bigger misunderstanding of statistics than any in the press release. Would be nice if the paper was not paywalled, so we could actually read it.

<comment><USER8> I put the full paper in pastebin: [http://pastebin.com/GH1ZY8Zx](http://pastebin.com/GH1ZY8Zx)

Didnt read it, so not sure if its sufficiently understandable without the figures. Prob not.

<comment><USER9> What's HN's stance on posting a paywalled article to pastebin like this? If I were to guess, I'd think this to be frowned upon.

<comment><USER10> I frown upon it because I prefer the PDF :P

<comment><USER11> Here you go: [http://www.uvm.edu/~cdanfort/csc-reading-group/tomasetti- sci...](http://www.uvm.edu/~cdanfort/csc-reading-group/tomasetti- science-2015.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm pretty confused by the term 'luck' in these papers. Surely 'random mutation' is exactly how cancer propagates in all cases? Risk factors _coexist_ with 'luck'. The chance of suffering a cancerous mutation is like rolling a dice, and risk factors are the equivalent of the number of dice being rolled. It's not a question of 'OR', it's a question of 'AND'.

E.g.: You're a smoker who develops lung cancer: you are 'unlucky' in the sense you suffered a random mutation AND also 'responsible' because you smoke, which is a primary risk factor.

<comment><USER13> I haven't read the Vogelstein paper yet, but from the abstract it seems that when its talking about 'luck', its talking about errors in DNA replication. The rate of these errors is pretty constant in healthy cells (about 1 per duplication), so its pretty much a matter of luck whether you acquire a mutation in a place that matters or a place that doesn't, and it doesn't really matter who you are or where you are. He seems to be contrasting this to other mechanisms that cause mutations, like chemicals, radiation, or viruses. Sure there is 'luck' involved at the individual level once you've been exposed, but the point is if you reduce exposure across the population, you reduce incidence rates. With DNA replication, there isn't anything you can do to reduce incidence rates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It bears pointing out some inaccuracy in language here, notably that 'types' and 'cases' are not the same thing.

Most 'types' of cancer are unequivocally about bad luck; nearly any cell line in your body can develop overproliferative mutations. There are hundreds of 'types' of cancer.

'Cases' and deaths from cancer are, globally and in the US, more environmentally influenced, because of the huge impact of smoking on lung and colorectal cancer incidence and mortality in particular.

</comment><comment><USER15> Great advise. There is nothing we can do about our "cancer good/bad luck" but there is a lot we can do to control life style issues.

This is just my opinion, but I think all of the following probably help: try to have much less stress in your life; plenty of exercise; prefer organic food if available; avoid deep fried food; go light on barbecuing, as tasty as it is; eat lots of and a wide variety of green vegetables.

</comment><comment><USER16> Physician here. I think I can provide some clarification for what is going on here. I just read the article the WHO is addressing and this is a line from the final paragraph:

 _Our analysis shows that stochastic effects associated with DNA replication contribute in a substantial way to human cancer incidence in the United States._

First, the terminology is important to understand. In medicine, "stochastic" is in contrast to "deterministic" which describe the occurences of pathology based on a risk factor. In a "stochastic" model, if you receive 10 severe sun burns then your chances of getting a skin cancer go up over someone who only received 1 severe sun burn, but are by no means certain or even that your cancer will be more severe... simply an increase in probability. In a "deterministic" model, if you receive 5 Grays of radiation then you will have less severe symptoms than someone who received 50 Grays of radiation and for the most part, your symptoms will be certain and predictable.

Now you need to have one element of cancer biology under your belt:

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

This basically says that as cells divide, errors are propagated through their progeny until there is a proverbial 'straw that breaks the camel's back' and the cell becomes cancerous.

In summary, that line from the final paragraph is basically saying that cells that divide more rapidly in the human body are more likely to become cancer. Well, yeah of course!

We have known this for a long time but what this paper did is sort cancers into two groups, one that is primarily stochastic and one that is primarily deterministic. The result _appears_ impressive because they have a lot of cancers on the stochastic side... stating that their incidence is more predicted by cell division rather than the deterministic, preventable factors.

But as the WHO correctly stated, they are incorrectly analyzing this data as described in this paragraph:

 _These include the emphasis on very rare cancers (e.g. osteosarcoma, medulloblastoma) that together make only a small contribution to the total cancer burden. The report also excludes, because of the lack of data, common cancers for which incidence differs substantially between populations and over time. The latter category includes some of the most frequent cancers worldwide, for example those of the stomach, cervix, and breast, each known to be associated with infections or lifestyle and environmental factors._

The cancers grouped into the stochastic side overall make up a tiny percentage of all cancers and so by number/%/incidence, the deterministic side would be enormous if graphed appropriately. For example, their most 'stochastic' cancer is pancreatic islet cell which only has 2500 cases/year in the US vs their 'lung smokers' cancer which has >220,000 cases/year.

I mean they seem almost willfully blind to their incorrect conclusion. Environmental factors are HUGE and the cancers caused independent of those would not benefit from screening and environmental risk reduction--a fact we already know!

As a last note, the 'most' deterministic cancers--inherited types--have to be agressively treated with screening, prophylactic measures and environmental exposure risk reduction, etc. You can read about a couple of the deterministic cancers they mention in this paper:

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

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

<comment><USER17> This is the key point. Tomasetti and Vogelstein (2015) arguably demonstrated that most types of cancer are primarily stochastic. But it's the primarily deterministic types of cancer that account for most morbidity and mortality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The variation among geographic locations is interesting. On the other hand the rise in the rate of colorectal cancer in Japan may simply be due to a rise in cancer screening. Do Japanese die more often from colorectal cancers? For an example of why this is relevant, over 80% of men in their eighties may have prostate cancer yet the lifetime risk of dying from it is only 3% for a 50 year old man in the US (see [http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/36/2/278.full](http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/36/2/278.full) ). So if we improve screening of prostate cancer we may find a lot more cases even though men's risk of dying from it is unchanged.

<comment><USER18> "A recent autopsy study reported on 314 African American and 211 Caucasian (sic) men aged 20–80 years who died of trauma in Detroit, USA. Microscopic evaluation in each case was based on 10–14 whole-mount step sections that were 2–3 mm thick.4 This study demonstrated a high prevalence of prostate cancer that increased progressively with advancing age and was similar at all ages in African American compared with Caucasian men (around 10%, 30%, 40%, 45%, 70% and 80% in the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th decades, respectively). When this ubiquity of microscopic prostate cancer is placed in the context of lifetime risks of clinical or fatal prostate cancer (about 10% and 3%, respectively for a man aged 50 years in the USA),5 these data indicate that local or distal progression of early cancer is far from inevitable within a man's lifetime. Put another way, only a minority of prostate tumours are highly aggressive and life-threatening, while the majority are slow-growing and indolent."

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A piece of data that appears to corroborate this article was recently on HN. It concerned a Greek island where people have unusual long life[0], and followed a man who was diagnosed in the US by 9 doctors with terminal cancer... only to survive them all from his island where it is believed several lifestyle factors play important roles in longevity (and cancer prevention/recovery for this man).

[0] [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island- where-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island-where-people- forget-to-die.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER20> > _For many cancers, the authors argue for a greater focus on the early > detection of the disease rather than on prevention of its occurrence. If > misinterpreted, this position could have serious negative consequences from > both cancer research and public health perspectives._

> _In principle ... nearly half of all cancer cases worldwide can be > prevented_

I am not sure what to take from this article. Lung cancer prevention is already in progress. At the same time prostate cancer has even higher mortality (for non smokers) and preventive checks are not even covered by most insurance companies.

<comment><USER21> Is it a myth that prostate cancer is something you die with, rather than die of?

<comment><USER20> I dont know. But in Europe preventive checks are highly recommended (and covered).

<comment><USER22> Where in Europe?

<comment><USER23> Germany, Sweden, Poland, probably most of EU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This official statement is rather odd as others have pointed out. Anyway, the biggest problem with the original paper is that they leave out breast and prostate cancer, the two most common cancers. Maybe these would support their hypothesis, but they leave them out and they don't really explain why. It's probably because we aren't sure what the true incidence is, due to ascertainment bias from increased screening. Whenever I read a broad ranging conclusion in life sciences research, I remind myself to stick <Except when it isn't> on the end (eg Most cancer is due to bad luck - except when it isn't.)

The paper also technically sets out to explain why cancer incidence varies between different tissues. An analogy is correlating the average temperature with distance from the equator. It is clear that most of the difference in the mean temperature of Equador compared to Iceland is explained by distance from the equator. You can create categories like number of days with rain, number of days with a temperature > 30 degrees C, and each of these values will be highly correlated with distance from the equator. But it does not follow that this strong correlation means that there are hardly any environmental influences on the temperature in St Petersburg tomorrow, and that we can fire all the meteorologists.

(Disclaimer for what follows: I do life sciences research, so I may have an overly pristine view about physics.)

The really interesting thing about all this I think is the collision of maths/physics/engineering and life sciences! Vogelstein wrote this paper with a mathematician. They basically did a back of the envelope calculation, an approach that is much favoured by engineers but completely alien to life science researchers. These simple calculations are useful because in the physics/engineering paradigm, abstractions are incredibly powerful and non- local. For example, many important physical laws that apply equally across many orders of magnitude, can be derived from thinking about falling apples or billiard balls. Paul Dirac predicted the positron by simply exploring other possible solutions to an equation! To me, this is an extraordinary and winning moment for quantum physics, where the theory is so powerful, that it can drag us screaming towards completely unintuitive and otherwise inaccessible conclusions. To a biologist, this kind of thing is ridiculous and alien. The same abstractive power is almost completely absent, and both experimental and theoretical models are extremely limited.

There are many reasons for this. You could argue that biology is not amenable to the often time-invariant abstractions so useful in the other sciences. Or perhaps biologists aren't trained to think that way. In any case, it is interesting to watch when an engineer encounters biology, and this paper is an example. I am still not sure whether we need more engineers in biology or not?

I think it is abundantly clear though that breakthroughs in biology don't come from professors having epiphanies while walking amongst the pine cones on a cloudy autumn day. Human intuition alone is failing to get us very far in biology. We need a paradigm that can deal efficiently with uncertainty, incomplete yet massive data, noise, simulation of highly parallel processes on long time scales, causality in networks of highly correlated actors etc - <USER2> hope that some future melding of computer science, biology and staggering computational resources will give us more useful ways to investigate life.

</comment><comment><USER25> Cancer is like Nuclear FUSION;

</comment><comment><USER26> Jeez, make up your mind, science!

<comment><USER27> It's not as simple as that. Most "indecisiveness" that appears to come from science is from different studies being taken out of context, or poor media reporting. Most wild claims you see aren't from the researchers themselves.

See Steven Novella's recent blog post on this subject.

[http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/scott-adams- on-...](http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/scott-adams-on-science- and-nutrition/)

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure that matters. It's ok to eat cholesterol now, right? All these "mistakes" give science a black eye. We've already got a Climate Change trustworthyness problem and for some reason people don't trust vaccines, mostly educated people. As a nation, we refused to fund both the Hubble and the Supercollider, which would have been bigger than CERN.

It's probably time that we stopped making excuses and think of a better way to explain the "science" to people.

<comment><USER27> >It's ok to eat cholesterol now, right?

The position of "science" has been to eat a balanced meal and exercise for as long as I can remember. You won't see a medical journal recommending fad diets. Steve covers this fairly well in the article I linked.

But still, public outreach could be greatly improved. It's unfortunate that many public doctors or educators on the subject are shills like Dr. Oz.

<comment><USER28> You could start by providing the links to the science! Why should I trust what you're saying? There's always someone on the Internet making claims. People debate have raging debates and few people actually provide real data.

<comment><USER27> Fair enough. :) Though in my case, showing where something "doesn't exist" isn't the most possible. But there's plenty out there on recommending balanced meals and exercise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The author makes a few references to the idea of "scientific consensus", which I find curious. It's a phrase that I tend to cast aside as politically motivated. Politicians in the climate change debate like to point to "scientific consensus" as a way of saying, "look, all these intelligent people whose work we personally don't understand agree, so they must be correct."

But one tenant of scientific thought is that truth and factuality are not measures of an individual's or society's belief, but rather, they are discovered by experiments whose results can be replicated.

> _People distrust science when it conflicts with their valued beliefs, or > when science suggests a solution or intervention that conflicts with their > beliefs. People are happy to trust science when it does not conflict with > their ideology or narrative._

I agree, but those same people generally rationalize those views to themselves in the way Adams noted: by pointing at reasons to distrust science or scientists. They get caught up in issues like "climategate", they assert that results about medical science are distorted by financial pressures, etc.

In short, the rationalizations of individuals who reject scientific results often point to the scientists behind the results, their interests and motivations, instead of the results themselves. This isn't exclusively true, but I think the tie in to the idea of "scientific consensus" is this:

Perhaps science would be better served by a decreased emphasis on the individuals carrying out scientific research and increased emphasis on the results themselves.

<comment><USER30> > Perhaps science would be better served by a decreased emphasis on the > individuals carrying out scientific research and increased emphasis on the > results themselves.

No thanks.

One of the worst aspects of modern day science right now is that the media et al seems to think it is okay to allow anyone to present counter arguments regardless of their scientific background. This causes problems for the laymen who has no ability to even comprehend let alone compare results from different individuals. And it is laymen who ultimately determines what science gets funded and what happens to the results of the science e.g. political action.

<comment><USER31> The results of one study could mean anything and I agree it should not be emphasized to the public.

However, the term "scientific consensus" makes truth sound like a popularity contest and worse - a popularity contest by people who claim they are better than you. This appeals to the authoritarian nature of people, not their critical nature. It is basically telling the public they aren't allowed to think. It's not only a jerk thing to do, it discourages scientific literacy outside of scientific professionals.

Another problem with the "scientific consensus" is due to its political influence and nebulous definition it is rife for abuse. If there is no rigorous methodology to determine it in an accurate and replicable manner, then it can be whatever someone says it is.

I agree that we need some sort of way of determining scientific validity by taking into account many tests, theory and perpectives, but "Scientific consensus" (whatever that is) is not it.</comment></comment></comment>


The Emerald Triangle: a year in the lives of California's marijuana farmers - <AUTHOR> http://www.themorningnews.org/gallery/the-emerald-triangle

<comment><USER2> I Have lived in Humboldt county my whole life. Growing weed is not as romantic as it seems. It has definitely helped the economy of our county, but it has hurt us too. Rats are attracted to weed, and growers put out Decon to kill them, which eventually kills the owls. A researcher documented this to get growers to stop. Someone killed her dog by feeding it Decon. We are also having a problem with creeks drying up from growers drawing water. The state is starting to crack down on this, just trying to get growers to be compliant

</comment><comment><USER3> I grew up in southern Humboldt County, in the heart of the emerald triangle. Marijuana used to be "mom and pop" businesses, often with legitimate businesses used as fronts. More recently, we've seen more Mexican cartel activity which has increased the violence, among other things.

I now live in Colorado where I voted for marijuana legalization (though I neither use nor grow), but back home, the growers don't want legalization because it would destroy their profits.

It's a very interesting market to look into. There's also a show called Weed Country that follows growers in the emerald triangle.</comment>


Experiences with OpenLaszlo - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> Specifically has anyone used OpenLaszlo in an environment with Django, Ruby on Rails, etc?</comment>


Ask HN: which angel programs are worthwhile besides YC and Techstars NYC? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> DreamIt Ventures already closed its NYC applications. I saw that Dreamit takes applications from hackers and business entrepreneurs and team them up. I'm not confident enough in my programming yet but I feel like I'm qualified for the business end, are there other programs like this where they create teams?

<comment><USER3> While DreamIt's summer NYC program is now closed (we've chosen our 15 companies), we will be opening up applications for our fall Philly program on May 9th and will be accepting applications for companies, hackers and strategists for that session as well. Full schedule for the Philadelphia program is here: <http://www.dreamitventures.com/about/Schedules.php>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're interested in applying to TechStars NYC email me: email@example.com . Happy to answer questions.

</comment><comment><USER5> DreamIt Ventures started in Philly and is launching in NYC this Summer. They take applicants for both startups as well as hackers interested in being matched up with a startup (Somewhat like being a Techstars "Hackstar")

</comment><comment><USER6> I hear good things about Techstars Boulder and not much enthusiasm for their other franchises

<comment><USER7> I'm a founder of a TechStars Boulder company from last summer and would be happy to answer any questions. In a nutshell, it was a great program and I'd do it again without hesitation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How's Venture.io? I almost applied to them but decided that Y-Combinator would be better.

</comment><comment><USER9> What about NYC seedstart, alphalabs, or betaspring? The latter two are part of the tech stars network, so I am curious what people think.

<comment><USER10> My team was in last year's Betaspring class. We had a blast, worked our asses off, and our company's doing well post-accelerator, thanks in no small part to the Betaspring partners, the mentors, and the other teams that went through the program with us. I recommend it highly.

Also, Providence doesn't suck like other cities. Just sayin'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is their anything in southern california?

</comment><comment><USER12> TechStars Seattle, TechStars Boston, TechStars Boulder ;) Seedcamp is fantastic as well

</comment><comment><USER13> angelpad I hear is great.

</comment><comment><USER14> capital factory in Austin</comment>


Investors don't look at pitch decks for very long - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/08/lessons-from-a-study-of-perfect-pitch-decks-vcs-spend-an-average-of-3-minutes-44-seconds-on-them/#.fmsjk4:mTM4

<comment><USER2> I guess then I'm not the only one to think the interpretation of the data in these slides is consistently poor.

e.g. The slide with the correlation scatter plots - who devised the model to draw those trend lines? That's just awful statistics.

e.g.2. The slide that judges the important pages in the deck based on the length of time they're looked at (important? why? why not 'complex' or 'difficult to grok'?)

e.g.3. Observed slide order actually says 'team is never in the middle', but then averages the team to be in the middle of the deck.

Hmmm. What an awful piece of data analysis on potentially interesting data.

<comment><USER3> Zero is an even number.

Two is an even number.

The average of two even numbers is an even number.

Therefore, one is an even number.

<comment><USER4> _The average of two even numbers is an even number_

In which universe is that true?

<comment><USER3> It isn't. That's the point. Fallacy in the middle of the argument.

<comment><USER4> At risk of outing myself as massively non hipster, I truly don't see the point. Stating obviously incorrect statements. What's the point of this game? If you're trying to suggest that the original poster made a mistake, grow up and just say so. Sometimes, there is a benefit to demonstrating a point obliquely, when doing so causes people to think about things in a new way and thus reach a burst of enlightenment. That's not the case here. This is just smug hipsterness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Remembering pg's great advice before demo day, a pitch has only 2 goals:

\- Capture the investors' attention -- they'll have to remember your company among dozens

\- Make them curious to hear more -- you want them to reach out and ask for a meeting

None of these requires a big number of slides, or for that matter, time to go through the pitch. Most entrepreneur do a simple mistake and try to put everything that's relevant to their project in the pitch.

<comment><USER6> Many of these decks are actually used for step 2—after investors have heard the initial pitch and are now interested in learning more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Average time could be very misleading here. I would assume that it's a bimodal distribution (or something similar), with many decks that get almost no time and some that get a lot of time.

So assuming a VC will spend ~4 minutes on your deck would be a bad idea. They'll probably either toss it out more quickly than that or take a decent amount of time to go through it properly.

<comment><USER8> A natural distribution in this case is the exponential distribution. In the first minute 80% gets thrown out. In the second minute 80% of the remainder gets thrown out, etc.

<comment><USER9> A bimodal distribution is way more likely. People just do not behave in free of context ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The bit about financials slides mattering most because investors spend more time reading them seems misleading, especially in light of the evidence that "only 57 percent of successful decks have this section."

Investors spend more time on financials slides because they're information dense (there's literally just more to read), because they often receive less design consideration than the "softer" slides (slap a table on there because it looks like something an accountant would make), and because they're calculating runway and evaluating business-savvy — not because they necessarily "matter more," whatever that even means.

<comment><USER11> I suspect it also has to do with traditions in finance. Due diligence, audits of accounts, etc, are a integral part of how education in finance is conducted. Also, it is easy to do the basic arithmetic and see if proposals "add up". So people are more used to examining financial documents in detail.

When it comes to markets, people, sales, etc, people are more used to going with their "domain knowledge" or "gut instinct", which takes only a few seconds.

<comment><USER12> IOW they bikeshed the financials.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd like to see those graphs redrawn with the outlier who contacted 300 investors removed.

<comment><USER14> The four outliers on the two y-axises could be excluded as well.

<comment><USER11> Simply removing "outliers" just because you don't like them isn't a rigorous approach.

<comment><USER14> But maybe lying outside of the range of the others might be a good reason? I'm no expert. Just a guess.

<comment><USER11> Do you actually know what the "true" range is?

The data presented is a sample, the "true" distribution might be different from what is shown, and if you start 'cleaning" the data based on subjective judgements, you might never discover the true range.

<comment><USER14> The thing is that the three dots that lay "outside the range were the other dots are" (not the "true" range which we of course don't know) have a higher impact on the conclusion than the amount of them justifies. That's why taking them out should not harm but help. This is not the same as taking datasets out of a medical study because they got sick by the new medicine. E.g., if you look at the left diagram. The upward swing in the red curve is probably the result of all the left points (199 points). But the downward trend is as far as I can see the result of 1 point on the right. So can we trust that downward trend as much as the upward trend? Probably not. Additionally removing the two dots at the 150 meetings point might result in the curve not having such a strong incline, but one that is backed by 196 points.

I really don't have more than basic education in statistics, but to me it looks like a slight but constant upward trend until 100 investors contacted and after that we simply don't have enough data. If you think about what the diagram talks about getting a constant upward line or even more likely a square root shaped line is very likely. Getting a bell curve is unlikely, just from thinking about the topic. What should happen that contacting more than X investors would result in less meetings?

In the second diagram removing the two dots at $4.5m and the two dots above 200 investors met leaves us with 196 data points that show a fairly equal spread and that the amount of investors contacted might not influence that much how much money you get in the end. That's also good because it's expected to find that company evaluation depends on company value (customers, market, team, etc) and not on how many investors you contact.

You make the data more conclusive by removing data points that have a big impact on your results without the backup of other data points. That's what handling outliers is.

<comment><USER11> As to the investors contacted vs meetings plot, the red line is evidently bogus. It is likely caused by trying to fit the data to some polynomial for which there is no a priori justification. A straight-line fit would look more reasonable and also be less affected by one "outlier" who contacted 300 investors.

I would agree that cutting-off curve fitting at 100-150 investors would look prettier; the thing to do in that case would be either to not attempt to fit a curve and just show the data, or alternately to fit only the earlier part (so the red line stops half-way across the x-axis), but show all the data.

The only reason for doing a curve fit on this kind of data is to show that the data fit some prior model, showing that the model is likely correct, or to show where some statistical value lies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "DocSend, a startup that provides people with a secure and private way of sharing files like offer letters or legal agreements, studied more than 200 pitchdecks ..."

If it's private, how were they able to study them?

<comment><USER16> Companies opted in. It's on slide 2 of their findings -> [https://docsend.com/view/p8jxsqr](https://docsend.com/view/p8jxsqr).

<comment><USER15> Oh I missed that! Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anybody see how the red lines in the "Strive for Quality, not Quantity" diagrams were generated? Looking at the data I don't get the impression that either one looks like it follows the data. Both lines seem to be as good as the other one in either diagram. I'm no expert but from having so many dots on the left sides and nearly none on the right sides I'd say the data is inconclusive. What do the data analysts say?

</comment><comment><USER17> This says mountains on the importance of good titles.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is why we used an legal-sized PDF infographic for our initial pitch document. We only raised 400K...but the round was full in 20 days.

<comment><USER19> I was thinking of just this for our 'send around' deck, and then if we were doing an actual in person pitch, then to use a pitch-deck.

Any chance you can share your infographic? I'd like to see how it wasy laid out.</comment></comment>


Issues with Amazon Route 53 name resolution - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/search?q=route53&src=typd <comment><USER2> Something is definitely up.

Also on desktop this link points to latest: [https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=route...](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=route53&src=typd)</comment>


Bees in Brooklyn Hives Mysteriously Turn Red - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/nyregion/30bigcity.html?_r=1&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter <comment><USER2> It's not "mysteriously", right? They ate Red dye #40 and they are now dyed red.

(I am a little outraged, though. First, it's annoying that bees are eating artificial food designed to save a few cents per liter of soda. But then you realize, if you're upset that _bees_ are gorging themselves on HFCS, isn't it even more outrageous that _people_ do it? I guess we have a conscious choice, and all, but it is amazing on how little interest the average person has in natural food.

I guess as long as the investors in the food companies get their 12% a year, it's all good...)

<comment><USER3> I think they are upset because of the honey, not because of the bees.

Honey is normally concentrated flower nectar after all, but these bees are making concentrated corn syrup, which I have much easier ways of getting.

<comment><USER4> Honey is made _from_ nectar, not _of_ nectar. It's pretty likely that what these bees are producing is not _that_ unlike regular honey. It just happens to be artificially coloured and likely has a different makeup of sugars.

What I don't get is why these people are so appalled that bees would do this. Bees don't know shit about nutrition, they just dig sweet stuff and stuff with bright colours. "Mother nature" doesn't "know best", it just does what it has evolved to do. These bees evolved to use what limited computation power they have to find bright stuff that's sweet. Most of the time this means flowers, but apparently not always.

If anything, I'd be excited. This is interesting and new stuff, not horrifying!

<comment><USER5> Well yeah, it's made from nectar, but there is usually a small amount of pollen, some amino acids, plant sterols and fats and so on.

That's like saying that banana-flavouring is LIKE bananas because it contains the same ester.

But you're right about the OTT reaction... The panicked, hand-wringing, "How COULD they?!" exclamations just show that someone doesn't really have a good grasp of the realities of being a non-human sapient.

<comment><USER4> Well, like normal honey, this substance is still being regurgitated by the bees. I'm not terribly familiar with the mechanisms involved but I was under the impression the conversion from nectar to honey was largely done by the bees digesting the nectar before depositing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did they execute the queen and divide the honey amongst themselves?

</comment><comment><USER7> The unanswered question here, for me, is: why is there so much sugar and dye in the _runoff_ from the cherry factory that the bees are interested in it? And why is runoff from anything being released untreated into the surface system?

(I'm glad they made explicit mention of Ms. Mayo's name, though. It was bugging me the whole time and gave the first half of the article almost an Onion-esque feel.)

<comment><USER8> The person who said it might be from run-off is a bee-keeper who has never visited the factory.

I rather suspect that the bees have found their way into the factory through a small hole, as insects are wont to do, and are directly consuming the syrup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sure the bees don't make good tasting honey anymore, but now they glow red at night! How is that not a win?

<comment><USER9> Oh come on, Direct quote from the article: "But Mr. Selig said there was something extraordinary, too, about those corn-syrup-happy bees that came flying back this summer.

'When the sun is a bit down, they glow red in the evenings,' he said. 'They were slightly fluorescent. And it was beautiful.'"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hehe, I like how all the way at the bottom they mention the fact the bee's glow in the dark now. If that's not a significant mark against artificial foodstuffs I don't know what is :)

<comment><USER5> While I understand your sentiment, your reasoning isn't the best. There are quite a few things that glow in nature:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glowworm> <http://www.springbrook.info/glow_worms/about_worms.htm> <http://rainforest- australia.com/Luminous_fungi.htm> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Considering cherry trees require bees to pollinate, you'd hope the damn cherry factory would be _very_ interested & concerned about this.

<comment><USER12> They don't grow cherries. The factory buys cherries and makes Maraschino cherries (pickled, dyed bright red, and packed in sugar syrup).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maraschino_cherry>

<comment><USER13> For what it's worth, there are still a couple of brands that make something close to actual maraschino cherries, i.e. without the disgusting amounts of red 40, artificial preservatives, and corn syrup. The ones made by Luxardo are reasonably good:

[http://www.amazon.com/Luxardo-Gourmet-Maraschino- Cherries-36...](http://www.amazon.com/Luxardo-Gourmet-Maraschino- Cherries-360g/dp/B001CDOBCM)

There are probably even better ones out there, though I haven't been able to find any yet.

<comment><USER14> Make your own the old fashioned way - just buy a bag of whole frozen sweet cherries, put them in a mason jar, and cover with Maraschino (Luxardo). After three days you'll have a mason jar full of delicious Maraschino cherries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> did they mutate to include arsenic in their DNA</comment>


How Outernet is bringing free internet to the world's poor - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2016/01/start/outernet-satellites-free-developing-world-content <comment><USER2> Interesting idea. It kind of reminds me of Teletext.

<comment><AUTHOR> The world needs more Ceefax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Uh oh, they're not providing the _whole_ internet... the net neutrality our species has been guaranteed as an inalienable right is being violated! We must not stand for such evil exploitation!

<comment><USER4> The comparison is obvious, but this is trying to solve a different problem than Free Basics (which is for areas where there are existing mobile networks).

Though it's interesting to consider the impact of having a read only, delayed, version of the web. That's much different from what most of us experience.

<comment><USER3> It is an interesting project. I love the idea, actually, and would enjoy playing with it-- especially if I was stuck somewhere isolated with no other connectivity options. To me, any access is nearly always better than none.</comment></comment></comment>


On Being a Science Writer and Managing a Mental Illness - <AUTHOR> http://www.theopennotebook.com/2017/07/18/on-being-a-science-writer-and-managing-a-mental-illness/ <comment><USER2> > For one thing, choosing writing as a way of making a living can nurture > insecurity and doubt—especially for those, like myself, who are early in > their careers. For me, at least, publishing a story is like handing in an > exam essay, an invitation for strict judgment by both the intended audience > and my peers.

I think people in tech tend to underappreciate the benefits of being able to just do the job and enjoy a (comparatively) lesser-stressful life with enviable benefits. Programming is creative endeavour too, but, no one is asked to build a product that succeeds in the market; that's the job of management.

Being a writer, or a musician, on the other hand, entails a perennial anxiety over the success of whatever you're doing. How will you ever know if your next thing will be liked or not? How will you know if you should continue working on your project when it starts to feel like an incoherent mess?

I have moments of self-doubt too but I am confident that I won't suddenly cease to be a decent programmer who gets things done. For many creative people who do it full time, it means fighting the monster every day.

<comment><USER3> You can be creative for your own self, and not for others. You don't always need to show your creations. That removes the success anxiety. You should not try to be liked by others, it's very unproductive. Or at least it should not be your primary concern.

Even if people say they don't like your creation, it doesn't matter as long as you like it. Nobody cares about your sleeping position, and if somebody criticizes it (unless it's a doctor), you already know their opinion doesn't matter because 1) evolution works by listening to our feelings 2) you can't know the absolute truth about anything 3) there are many diverse opinions out there. It applies to creativity as well.

Only time and long term execution will tell if what you do matters (and to be honest, it does not matter anyway). But ultimately your cannot apprehend your work and the expectations of people. People are not able to tell you what they want, so it's not worth it to listen to them. I like to think creativity works in the realm of evolution and natural selection. It's impossible to predict what will work or not.

<comment><USER4> I agree with a lot of this, and I think it's helpful to remember that people perceive things differently. In much the same way that cilantro tastes like soap to some people, certain images, tropes, and turns of phrase will not resonate with some people - no matter their quality. If the work is of high quality, it will resonate with some people/some groups - in your lifetime, if you're fortunate.

Take your work seriously, but don't take your art seriously. Do the best you can, experiment, test your limits, but at the end of the day, have perspective. Even if you reach the highest level of your craft, you're still just you. If you spend time developing yourself, trust your instincts and creativity, and you're a brutal self-editor, you should put out work representative of where you're at as a person/artist. To my understanding, that's all you can do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >A 40-year study published in 2012 found that writers are more likely than people in other, less creative occupations to suffer from mental illnesses such as bipolar, depression, and general anxiety disorder.

This bothers me. It's correlated but the following analysis assumes at least partly that being a writer is one possible factor for depression. Very common mistake most HNers are probably aware of.

For a science writer to read papers so wrongly is rather ironic.

<comment><USER6> > It's correlated but the following analysis assumes at least partly that > being a writer is one possible factor for depression.

And why shouldn't it be a possible factor? Correlation doesn't tell that it has to be a factor but neither the opposite.

<comment><USER5> Yes, maybe, but there's no proof so why assume it and make an article like this which doesn't even has any reserve about it (reread the paragraph I quoted if you doubt my claim) ? There's not even one "maybe" in his whole essay !

<comment><USER6> Ok, I'm really more bothered by the expected scientific rigorous from an essay like this.

He's a writer and is experiencing the difficulties of his work and how it effects his emotional well being. It shouldn't then really surprise that he sees a strong connection between his work as a writer and the depressions he has. That doesn't mean he's telling an objective truth about a writer's life, but he's telling a subjective "truth" of his life as a writer, and sometimes these subjective "truths" can tell you quite a bit about life.

Sometimes the HN crowd can get quite a bit annoying with its scientific thinking, because it's not always the appropiate method, and sometimes a single person can tell you more about a certain aspect of the world then any kind of scientific study.

I'm certainly not arguing against the scientific method, but to apply it in a reasonable way.

<comment><USER7> The suggestion that there are other kinds of valid thinking besides scientific thinking is way off.

No matter how obvious something feels, you can't know it's truth value. Humans can have auditory, visual and conceptual delusions that are completely convincing and completely opposite of what other humans experience.

The only conclusion you can draw from this essay is it's actually how the author says he thinks he feels. This may be a good starting hypothesis for a more rigorous study, but it says very little about life in general.

<comment><USER8> So you're saying your comment isn't valid thinking?

<comment><USER7> My comment would fall under the hypothesis generation step of the scientific method, just like the article.

It may or may not be proper thinking - without executing the remaining steps to test a theory, we can't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On a related note, Phillip K Dick's work seems to have gotten better over time the more his schizophrenia progressed.

</comment><comment><USER10> reads like a medication pamphlet.

therapy is more useful than drugs, even if drugs are needed eventually.

but I think this follow the US school of thought, where therapy is just one session required for liability before you're sent to a psych who will prescribe a pill regimen on the very first session. unbelievable.

<comment><USER11> > therapy is more useful than drugs, even if drugs are needed eventually.

Is it your opinion based on... ?

<comment><USER10> says the whole world. almost every european country requires you to do minimum hours of therapy before and to keep with therapy during the drug usage.

to begin with, I could refer you to the study the article is about. it correlates a social setting with high occurrence of depression. then it proceeds to promote the solution with medication. when the obvious solution is changing the social setting! that is the definition of the 80s joke "prozac for bad hair day"

<comment> vertex-four Or, in other words, (at least some part of) the medical industry is driven by the neoliberal ideal that it's never anything else that's the problem, only yourself, and you're meant to deal with it with minimal impact on anyone around you?

Work must never be an issue, or we might have to treat workers well. Society and societal structures must never be an issue, or we might have to care about each other on a more than skin-deep level and drop this whole "we are all independent beings who are completely unaffected by external factors" madness.

At least some part of mental healthcare is essentially a system designed to help people cope with a society which does horrific things to them, and then gaslights them into believing it's their fault for not coping with it.

<comment><USER3> > and then gaslights them into believing it's their fault for not coping with > it.

I don't understand why you say that.

Are you saying therapy make people feel guilty of their own self?

<comment> vertex-four No, society does that. Our society is, apparently, perfect, and if you have trouble living in it, it's your fault - says society. However, how we often approach mental healthcare - as something individualistic and separate from society - is one of the things that normalises it.

<comment><USER3> > is one of the things that normalises it.

Why ?

It depends, coping with the imperfection of society is also something to work on. Accepting its flaws lets you walk around it. Sometimes it's not the individual who is the problem, but it doesn't mean he should not accept how the society is flawed.

Mental healthcare and therapy have an individualistic approach because that's what they do, how else? To change society you would need politics, and that's another matter entirely.

I often say that mental illness doesn't really exist, because as long as we don't understand the brain there is no "normal" behavior. But as the same time you can't deny that society has its norms.

<comment> vertex-four > To change society you would need politics, and that's another matter > entirely.

That's the point - it's _not_ another matter entirely. If society is damaging people's mental health, it's entirely unethical to look the other way and pretend it's each individual's problem. If mental healthcare professionals want to ensure the wellbeing of their patients, they need to be fighting alongside us for widespread societal change, and they need to fight against the myth of poor mental health being an individual anomaly.

But getting to that point requires an understanding that mental health isn't individualistic in the first place, which is not what we're told, and it's not what our doctors are taught. What we have right now is, a lot of the time, treating symptoms and providing coping mechanisms instead of treating the causes. Imagine a doctor did that with a broken leg - refused to touch it, but instead provided you painkillers and explained how to plan routes around the city with lots of seats you can sit in when the pain gets too much.

<comment><USER3> I see what you mean, except mental illnesses can't be treated like a broken leg can be.

Mental health is a difficult subject.

Imagine the problem it can be to treat homosexual as equals in the political scene, it will be another story to have consideration for the mentally ill.

The more we become a society of people with knowledge rather than social norms and morals, the more we will be able to progress.

I also really believe that group therapy should be the future of therapy...

Maybe you should have a conversation with a psychologist or a therapist and talk about those things. A possibility is also that patients need to be told that nothing is their fault. It can take a lot of time to defuse the person's belief that a he/she is not "defective". There is no shame in going to therapy, it's all about talking, because that the most concrete thing you can do with a brain.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Casting a vote online can be secure and convenient - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/online-voting-isnt-as-flawed-as-you-thinkjust-ask-estonia <comment><USER2> (We work with local governments.)

This isn't why we don't have online ballots. The issue is specifically that you aren't in a voting booth, which means there is no control over voter influence.

Imagine a husband and wife plus a ballot initiative on outlawing flowers. The husband is strongly pro-flowers while the wife is strongly anti-flowers.

With online voting, the husband or wife can force the other to vote in front of them. There is no plausible deniability, so individuals are easily pressured into voting one way or another. Groups can say, "you need to vote in front of another group member" to pressure everyone to do what they want.

Voting booths prevent this, to a large extent.

Another issue is electioneering. By current law, one cannot campaign within 100ft of a polling station. This gives a "safe-space" where people can think about their options and make up their own mind. If I can vote on my phone, a random volunteer can get me all hyped up on the street and I can impulse-vote on the spot. Not a great way to run a nation.

(I'm not saying the current system is perfect, or anywhere close to it.)

<comment><USER3> It does. The article says that you can always cancel your vote later.

So vote pro-flowers in front of husband, and then change your vote on your cellphone or in the library

<comment><USER2> Same problem. There has to be some deadline, so if you want to ensure compliance than you wait until the last minute and watch them until expiration.

<comment><USER3> You can also vote in advance (in person), which overrides the e-vote

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm sure the director of the self described "leading provider of voting technologies" thinks this all makes sense. But the premise here, that the US has a low voter turnout and e-voting somehow makes it all better, is wrong. Countries with e-voting don't generally have better voter turnout than comparable countries. The countries with the best voter turnout doesn't have any electronic voting systems at all! What they generally have are "boring" things including well functioning free media and high education.

But funny he should mention Estonia's e-voting scheme specifically. There was a very interesting look at Estonia's e-voting system at a previous CCC. Here is a video of the talk: [https://youtu.be/JY_pHvhE4os](https://youtu.be/JY_pHvhE4os)

(Spoiler: Opsec fails begins at 42 min. But watch the whole thing, it's interesting.)

And the system in Estonia is not an especially bad example. E-voting in is hard even in theory, with issues like transparency and voting secrecy, but the systems in actual use have hasn't even nailed the engineering problems yet.

<comment><USER5> From what I gather, Estonia's is one of the better systems deployed, and it seems to have had a lot of thought put into its design. Nonetheless, it's insecure, if only because of the poor operational security of the people running it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Estonia's e-voting system has well-known flaws: [http://estoniaevoting.org/](http://estoniaevoting.org/)

Voting requires authentication, verifiability and anonymity.

Online electronic voting only allows you to pick two.

They may be lo-fi, but paper ballots work very well here, and engineering a secure Internet voting system which maintains these attributes is a difficult problem.

The people who understand computer security and voting systems well will never design an Internet voting system, because they know it can't be safe. Unfortunately, that means we're left with systems deployed by those who don't understand these well.

<comment><USER6> Well, you can pick: full verifiability, full authentication, and anonymity-as- long-as-you-dont-share-your-vote-receipt, which might work in some settings where the social norm against something like vote buying is strong enough that the party that tried this would end up with more of its own voters deflecting than opposing voters selling their vote to them.

But there is one more problem: most verifiable voting protocols are fiendishly complex for the average voter to validate, specially if they need to keep in mind how to verify things in a way that is robust to their devices being compromised. If you were holding an election where only people with a crypto or security systems Ph.D. voted and where they would rather punch you in the face than sell you a vote for 1 million USD, then you could have very secure online voting. The real world is a little bit more complex than that... one of the main advantages of paper ballots is that the technology involved is quite widely understood.

<comment><USER7> You jumped from "hard to verify" into "hard to vote" with no explanation there.

There's little problem in an election where only people with knowledge of cryptography can verify the official results.

<comment><USER6> Not quite. Ok, I might be exaggerating with the CS Ph.D. requirement for the average voter, but there are two steps:

1) Verify that my vote was correctly encoded and cast as intended. Every voter must verify this. It can be as "easy" as: printing a hash produced by a voting terminal/device you trust (which doesn't need to be government provided), submitting the resulting encoded vote into a (untrusted) government website where you authenticate with a smartcard, and then later comparing your original hash against a hash published in a newspaper... This exceeds the level of sophistication/care of most voters in any large country.

2) Some organization must check a large trail of signatures, zero-knowledge proofs of correctness, re-encryption mixnets, etc, etc. This can be done well enough as long as every political party and election watchdog has one or two crypto professionals in their employ.

I am not really worried about #2, even though it is harder, I am worried about #1. The important part is that all the checking of the world regarding #2 is useless without at least a representative subset of voters performing #1 (~1% would be enough, but only if distributed uniformly at random, otherwise you can flip votes from the population(s) least likely to check).

<comment><USER7> Yes, #1 is a bit too hard for everybody to do it. Yet, you can help some random set of your friends, while I help some random set of my friends, we add some neighbors at random, and much quicker than you thought, there will be a representative set of verified votes.

<comment><USER6> No, you won't. You will get a representative set of "votes for voters who have at least one friend who went to college or had the resources to be a computer geek growing up". Then if I want to manipulate the election, I will just flip votes from elderly lower income voters in rural communities and likely not get caught at all.

For an analogy: I grew up in Mexico during the 70 years PRI rule, and I can tell you in my city, in my polling station, with watchers from all major parties and a few ONGs, it is actually very unlikely that anyone stuffed the ballot. But in a rural area, where Spanish is not the primary language and the poll watchers were all from one party or few enough to be for sale... well... My point being that a similar scheme is quite possible when the barrier is "computer literacy" instead of "rights literacy" or plain old literacy (in the country's majority language, I mean). Either way, the smaller the group of people who understand how the election works, the easier it is to disenfranchise people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> And when the next mirai bonnet is turned against the online voting infrastructure, what happens then? Or perhaps ISP hubs in specific areas are targeted to suppress entire groups of voters?

Not to mention, the ability to 'undo' a vote is only marginally helpful in preventing voter coercion or vote buying - it only changes the way it's done a bit.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've followed Estonia's efforts in online voting for quite a while and it always reminds me of the premise about platforms of the greatest scale acquiring the most attention by bad actors (and typically leading to more exploits accordingly).

How would Estonia's online voting hold up to the kind of global assault that a US system would inevitably draw for example? If Russia, China and the US all went to work on trying to influence (or damage) the outcome by attacking Estonia's voting system, what would happen? All online voting systems will not all receive the same level of assault or garner the same kind of attention toward that end. The best technology companies in the world find it difficult to create an atmosphere of extremely high level security around information, transactions, etc. Outside of very large monetary theft, could there be a juicer target than being the group or hacker that collapses the US online voting system? It would make the front page of every newspaper on earth and would cause as much or more immediate financial damage than 9/11 did. The US stock market would at least temporarily shed hundreds of billions of dollars the next open day.

There is a very strong argument to be made that one size will never and could never fit all when it comes to online voting.

</comment><comment><USER10> "One remaining problem is that the personal devices that voters use to cast their ballots can become infected with malware that reads their passwords and PIN codes from their keystrokes or that allows hackers to remotely control their desktops."

"The Estonia National Electoral Committee responded to their criticisms shortly after by saying that the theoretical attacks they described were not feasible."

But why wouldn't those attacks be feasible?

</comment><comment><USER11> > Casting a vote online can be secure and convenient

I don't recall convenience being a fundamental attribute of maintaining democracy.

Having said that, some countries' current voting systems are a mish-mash of different methods, approaches, technologies and even rules (I'm looking at you USA), that make paper-ballot voting less "convenient" than it could be. There's no reason why paper-ballot voting needs to be inconsistent across electoral boundaries, difficult to execute, or difficult to validate (cf: Australia's system).

<comment><USER12> _I don 't recall convenience being a fundamental attribute of maintaining democracy._

Convenience is important to ensure a representative sample of the population is heard, and not just those who have enough free time to wait in line to vote. Mail-in ballots are a good example of convenience allowing greater participation.

<comment><USER11> Absolutely agree, but convenience does not trump security, verifiability etc. In the example you gave, mail-in ballots were primarily introduced as an exception to the rule, in order to increase participation. They are not a wholesale replacement for ballot-box voting.

<comment><USER13> In Washington, Oregon, and Colorado, voting is entirely by mail.

<comment><USER11> Really? You Americans and your strange ways :-)

I can see then, why for some, the argument that "e-voting can enable use of standover tactics" falls on deaf ears - because the risk is no different than what is currently the case.

<comment><USER13> It's true. I can see the risk here, since I could easily pressure my wife into voting a certain way or even fill out her ballot and forge her signature (if I ignored the warnings that it's a felony to do so). I think we have to weigh that risk against the benefits of greater participation/accessibility that vote by mail provides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This doesn't explain how you prevent against paying or pressuring people for their vote. If someone can potentially watch you as you vote, this is not an anonymous voting scheme anymore.

<comment><USER3> It does. One can drop by the next day and vote for someone else (and the last vote wins over earlier, and physical voting overrides e-voting).

However, it still requires that people "undo" their vote. I can imagine that a large percentage of people won't, so it will still be a net gain to coercion.

<comment><USER14> I missed this part.

It seems like a good idea indeed but it could be countered. Force or pay a person to vote the last day and then to give you their ID until the vote is closed.

Of course, it's still a step in the right direction as it makes a large vote buying scheme harder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> My fear is that:

1\. _Right now_, I don't know how many nation states are trying to hack the election in Estonia. I know of quite a few who would be more than happy to do so in the US. And while it's true you can send spies... it's much easier and safer to hack from a safe base than to go into foreign countries (and no plausible-deniability).

2\. You're _assuming_ no one's logging anything. There's no way to ensure that.

</comment><comment><USER15> It can be "secure" but paper ballots are probably the most temper-proof.</comment>


Some crazy and not so crazy startup and project ideas - <AUTHOR> http://syskall.com/some-crazy-and-not-so-crazy-startup-and-proje

<comment> saiko-chriskun love the second idea! would totally be willing to help build something like that :3. I can already see a few ways it could be expanded, as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, with the second idea I'd be scratching my own itch. I guess a MVP wouldn't be hard at all. Get in touch if you'd like to discuss further email@example.com ;)</comment></comment>


Nubank has acqui-hired Plataformatec - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/building-nubank/tech-perspectives-behind-nubanks-first-acquisition-deal-what-this-business-move-means-and-how-it-d7d1233c72b8 <comment><AUTHOR> Of note regarding Plataformatec open source projects: [http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2020/01/important- informati...](http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2020/01/important-information- about-our-elixir-and-ruby-open-source-projects/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Nubank is one of the biggest Clojure companies.</comment>


Snoopy Has Been Fired by MetLife - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/snoopy-has-been-fired-by-metlife-1476966706 <comment><USER2> > The decision to hive off the U.S. life insurance operations—into a new > company called Brighthouse Financial—happened because of strategic and > regulatory reasons. Company officials have said the new company will be > small enough to avoid federal designation as "systemically important" and > thus should be able to sidestep potentially stiff capital rules.

This is a key paragraph and it should be understood that this is an intended effect of the regulations.

The "Dodd-Frank" bill that was passed in the wake of the financial crisis gave the Federal Reserve new responsibility and authority to regulate "systemically important" financial institutions of _any_ industry. These are the companies that would come to mind when you think "too big too fail." Prior to this bill, the Fed only had authority over commercial banks.

If a company gets designated as "systemically important," it has to meet higher capital ratio requirements and other extra regulatory hurdles. This is to (try to) make it less likely that the company will fail. But it will obviously have an impact on financial performance.

Some companies--like GE and now MetLife--instead choose to downsize their financial operations to get them under the "too big to fail" line.

This has the same effect as if the federal government "broke them up"\--but it was accomplished via incentive instead of direct action.

The potential downside is that large companies do have some financial advantages, and foreign companies don't have the same regulatory requirement. (Their U.S. subsidiaries do, but not their business overseas.) Thus, over time we might see capital flow out of the U.S.

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of when I lived in Copenhagen. There were laws against businesses being opened on Sunday. But if your store was small enough, you were exempt. And so I regularly saw two or three tiny and separate H&M stores side-by-side with each other.

<comment><USER4> It's a bit different because they're actually selling (parts of) that business unit – a holding is evaluated as single entity.

Oh, and H&M frequently does small shops in locations without such laws as well. They often have separate stores for men/women/children or along segments of style (i. e. stores with only formal menswear). It could be marketing, availability of retails space or an attempt to remain flexible.

It's also not too hard to make such laws airtight, or to leave some details to the executive branch which can react much faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is 100% about MetLife cutting its business in America (No more life insurance polices).

Also am I the only one who finds the Peanuts to be depressing? I hated the way everyone treated Charlie Brown and I disliked everyone, including Charlie Brown. I have felt this way since I was 5.

<comment><USER6> Go read the original Peanuts strips. They weren't about entertainment, they were a look into bullying and the depressing life of Charlie Brown. (please forgive linking to Kotaku but I enjoyed this article [http://kotaku.com/how- snoopy-killed-peanuts-1724269473](http://kotaku.com/how-snoopy-killed- peanuts-1724269473))

<comment><USER7> > _Go read the original Peanuts strips. They weren 't about entertainment, > they were a look into bullying and the depressing life of Charlie Brown._

From his phrasing that seems to be the parent's problem.

They would probably like the lighter, more fluff and less serious Peanuts better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> And here's some content not behind a paywall: [http://adage.com/article/cmo- strategy/goodbye-snoopy-metlife...](http://adage.com/article/cmo- strategy/goodbye-snoopy-metlife-rebrands/306363/)

<comment><USER9> Also [http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/10/20/metlife- fires...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/10/20/metlife-fires- snoopy/92452986/)

(Via the web link on top of the page, there's other news pages if you don't feel like sneaking into the WSJ through the Google stable door.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Am I the only one disappointed that this means Snoopy won't be in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade?

</comment><comment> D-Coder I found the title of this article misleading — clickbaity. "Fired" suggests that Snoopy did something that cost him his job. The company changed direction, and Snoopy was no longer needed.

Snoopy was laid off, or rightsized, or something. Not fired.

</comment><comment><USER9> Another old-timer loses his job, probably not going to land another gig anytime soon. Hopefully can draw a pension.

"People familiar with the matter said the most-recent contract was signed in 2014 and costs MetLife $10 million to $15 million a year."

That's peanuts.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm glad they've finally stopped selling life insurance and retirement annuities to children.

</comment><comment><USER12> Modern marketing and iconography is so bland. The new MetLife logo looks like a feminine product.

</comment><comment><USER13> The article is blocked by paywall for me, even when coming from google.com

</comment><comment><USER14> _Slightly off topic:_ When I click this article link via HN, the article gives me a paywall. Ugh. However, If I then copy and paste the article title into Google ("Snoopy Has Been Fired by MetLife"), I get the same exact link but WSJ doesn't paywall the user from Google. *smh

Is that a common practice with news sites? ...seems kind of silly to me.

EDIT: Wow, derp. I never realized the HN link labeled "web" takes you to a web search for the title of the submitted article, so that you can bypass the paywall. Thanks for the insight, everyone!

<comment><USER15> Google penalizes sites that don't show the same content the crawler saw to to users clicking links, so if you want your content to be indexed and high in the rankings you have to give visitors from Google the full articles. Nobody else has the market power to do that, so links from all other sites lead to the paywall.

<comment><USER14> Ah, I didn't realize this was a thing. Not sure why I got downvoted by someone for asking about it, but I do appreciate you taking the time to give some more insight! ha

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I guess business news = hacker news now.

</comment><comment><USER17> Bastards</comment>


Everything i needed to know about managing hackers, i learnt from my DVD collection.. - <AUTHOR> http://www.sensepost.com/blog/2139.html

<comment><USER2> This blog post had the material and insight to make a really great essay or lesson. However, I just can't ever really accept something like this from someone who writes in "chatspeak".

The guy fashions himself as a hacker as well as a manager. Surely he types fast enough that spelling out "you" instead of "u" is essentially the same effort. Other grammatical errors in the piece really detract from its ability to deliver a powerful message.

Perhaps it's just me, but I would not want to be represented by a leader who could not properly communicate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi brk. Your points on grammar and "chatspeak" are well taken. Our blog was actually started as an informal, un-moderated method of communicating with each other (and friends / readers). Inferring that the author can not "properly communicate" because it does not match your expectations seems harsh, but is certainly your prerogative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There are more and better lessons to be learnt from _300_.</comment>


How can you monetize a Google App Engine site? - <AUTHOR>

Would you be able to charge users for parts of your service that are provided via Google App Engine?
1) Is it technically possible to build in a payment method to accounts?  (I'm pretty sure it would be if you have a free product and ask your users to pay for additional services and features.)
2) Is it allowed under the Google App Engine terms and services?
3) Will end users who are used to having everything free from Google pay for a service that they use their "free" Google login to use? <comment><USER2> why would you even waste your time building on google apps?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because I want to sell the product I build to Google for a few million dollars.</comment></comment>


Multi-threaded and Async PHP (yup it exists) support on Platform.sh - <AUTHOR> https://platform.sh/2016/12/php-71/#.WGVk_JYqHfM.hackernews <comment><AUTHOR> And here is a nice example with the react PHP framework [https://github.com/platformsh/platformsh-example- reactphp](https://github.com/platformsh/platformsh-example-reactphp) and another one with AmPHP/Aerys [https://github.com/platformsh/platformsh- example-amphp](https://github.com/platformsh/platformsh-example-amphp)</comment>


Google's new privacy policy. Will be in effect from October 3, 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacypolicy_2010.html

<comment><USER2> dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1660405>

<comment><USER3> Actually, these point at different URLs. The post you've linked to points to a diff of the policies which is much better:

<http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy_changes_2010.html></comment></comment>


Pac-Man Proved NP-Hard - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27528/?p1=A2 <comment><USER2> "We assume full configurability of the amount of ghosts and ghost houses, speeds, and the durations of Chase, Scatter, and Frightened modes"... "The game alternates between Chase and Scatter mode fast enough, so that each ghost reverses direction after covering only one tile. "

I'm sorry, but this is a sick and twisted version of Pac Man.

</comment><comment><USER3> On a tangential note, HNers might be interested in the annual Ms Pacman vs Ghosts competition: <http://www.pacman-vs-ghosts.net/>

Entrants are required to write a controller for Ms Pacman or the ghosts using at least one computational intelligence technique. Entries are played against each other in a tournament.

It's a great way to get some experience with stuff like neural nets, evolutionary algorithms and so forth.

<comment><USER4> That reminds me of the 2005 ICFP contest (<http://icfpc.plt- scheme.org/spec.html>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This could use a better title; the noteworthy thing here is not that Pac-Man is NP-Hard, but that this guy has covered the computational complexity of a whole bunch of games at once.

<comment><USER6> He also changed basic game mechanics to make it NP-Hard. Packman's scoring is based on collecting items and is not time dependent. So there are effectively unlimited games that all share a perfect score unlike the traveling salesman which has a single optimal solution. To make it NP-Hard requires one way paths though the maze.

<comment><USER7> same with starcraft: "Suppose the two players have bases on diff erent islands, player B has a strong ground army but no income and no way to reach player A, while player A has no units and needs exactly x resources to train an army and barely defeat B. Player A starts with just enough resources to train a worker. In yet another un- reachable island, there are n locations, each of which has a main building of A (to which workers must bring the resources they collect) and x=n resources. There is also a worker in each location, but it is "trapped" behind some resource batches, and cannot reach the main building. On each path connecting two locations, there is a turret (or other static defence) of B, positioned in such a way that a lone worker traversing the path isbound to be killed, but if two workers traverse it, exactly one survives. B hopes for a draw, while A has only one strategy: Train a worker at some location, collect the resources, thus setting the second worker free, traverse a path with both workers to reach another location, and repeat. A cannot waste resources into training more than one worker, and can win if and only if the (planar) graph of locations has a Hamiltonian path."

which raises the question - what is a game? is it the collection of _all possible_ permutations of states allowed by the rules, as in the Pac-Man generalization or this extremely weird corner case SC scenario that requires extended amounts of sub-optimal play? If I -can- construct such a bizarre and entrenched StarCraft position, is it part of "the game", or is it a weird theoretical custom map whose sole purpose is proving starcraft is np-hard to "solve"

<comment><USER8> It is also possible that on any legally-sized starcraft map the number of nodes in the graph would be so small that the solution would be trivial.

But at the same time it's fascinating that they were able to embed this sub- problem within a starcraft scenario, such that any optimal player would have to solve this NP-hard problem. This sort of argument is a classic in the field, and always fun to read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have to be missing something here. Isn't it obvious that any discrete, single use, path location traversal can be transformed into the tsp by making every point on the path a node connected to it's nearest neighbors? Is the newsworthy point that some games do not require every point to be visited?

<comment><USER10> Say you want to prove your problem A is NP-hard and you know already that problem B is NP-hard. The fact that you can transform every instance of A to an instance of B does not prove anything, because it could be that you only create instances in a subset of B that are easy.

To prove that A is NP-hard, you have to do the opposite. Show how you transform every instance of B into an instance of A, so that a solution of A implies a solution of B. Then if you had a solver for A, you could use it to solve B, which is impossible unless P=NP (since B is known to be NP-hard). In this case, you have to transform TSP to Pac-Man, not the other way around. Some technicalities aside (which are important, nevertheless), this is how hardness proofs go, sorry if it was a bit obscure.

<comment><USER11> To explain it even easier: every integer addition problem can be transformed into a TSP problem, but not vice-versa.

<comment><USER9> that would be an awesome entry into a rube goldberg contest...

<comment><USER11> Basic start to a rigorous solution:

Input: A, B : integers

Output: directed graph G(V, E, w) (V = vertices, E = edges, w = weight fn)

V = {c1, c2, c3}

E = {(c1, c2), (c2, c3), (c3, c1)}

w(c1, c2) = A

w(c2, c3) = B

w(c3, c1) = 0

shortest tour is the only valid tour whose length is clearly A + B.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> To rank the complexity of a game, as it relates to the user, couldn't you:

Record 1 hour of input in a string. Run a block level compression algo on it, and order the compressed strings on size?

Wouldn't that give a measure of the amount of input required by the game, coupled with how much of that input repeats/has simple patterns?

</comment><comment><USER13> Pretty neat. Is this rating based purely on the game's principles, or does the AI algorithms use--for controlling the Ghosts, or creating the stages--have a bearing on the Game's hardness/completeness?</comment>


Out of this world kickstarter campaign  - <AUTHOR> http://www.planetaryresources.com/2012/06/back-us-on-kickstarter/

<comment><USER2> The company was started by billionaires in the first place -- kind of strange that they should be looking for some loose change (at best some $50k). More likely just a way to garner the interest and attention of the wider tech crowd.

</comment><comment><USER3> I keep hoping that the tech crowd will adopt a few big science and engineering projects. We're a large enough group we should be able to crowd fund something significant. A million hackers giving $100/year.</comment>


Twitch Sues Over Bots Artificially Inflating Broadcasters' Popularity - <AUTHOR> http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/video-game-streamer-twitch-sues-904113 <comment><USER2> Wow, talk about a psychological blind spot...the entire time, from reading the submitted title to the article itself, I had read "Twitch" as "Twitter" (while half-wondering, "why are they going after news broadcasters?"). Inflated follower counts are a problem on Twitter, especially when lending credibility to an account, but I don't think Twitter will really go out of its way to fight them. Users like having that followers number be high, no matter the lack of substance, as evidence at how pissed everyone was when Instagram cleaned house...some users even felt they "earned" those spam follows: [http://www.businessinsider.com/chaos-ensues-as-instagram- del...](http://www.businessinsider.com/chaos-ensues-as-instagram-deletes- millions-of-accounts-2014-12)</comment>


The Work Diary of Parisa Tabriz, Google's 'Security Princess' - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/business/parisa-tabriz-google-work-diary.html <comment><USER2> An odd article. The takeaway between all the fluff is that Parisa spends 12 hours a day working for Google and half her meals are cereal?

</comment><comment><USER3> Parisa is an extremely competent expert in her field, but this article lacks substance. Of course the target is a general reader, but frankly, there are so many interesting things about her and her work one could write a completely different article and it would make a great reading also for not-technical readers.

</comment><comment><USER4> In rural America, some families share an entire email account. Poor communal cultures can be like that.

The bizarre thing about this piece is that usually the focus isn't on the person, but on the impact they have through their job? This seems like the focus is on how the job impacts her.</comment>


The Startup Legitimizer - <AUTHOR> http://thestartuplegitimizer.com/ <comment><USER2> Edits: context.

Fake it until you make it, as they say. However, this is dishonest (if it isn't a joke).

BUT... On the flip side, my anecdotal evidence suggests that naughty founders are statistically more successful. I think PG has some anecdotes to support this as well. Successful founders I know personally, without naming names, have: spammed inboxes, started automated 'conversations' with business owners as part of a pre-sales-filter, deceived potential employees about outcomes, fired the whole team to save money and pivot when there was still a crap-ton of money in the bank, and generally been willing to sell concepts to investors that are total crap. Then there are the well-known stories, like AirBnB fishing Craigslist for homeowners and renters. All shady, grey-hat, probably unethical to lots of people.

There is a low-bar of naughtiness that, if you're not willing to exceed, will limit your ability to be successful... anecdotally speaking.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is not building trust, actually the opposite. This is what fakers would do.

Some time ago I build a startup that required good looking people and even kids in all ages to provide me with their email, several photo's, their location and their (cell)phone number, which enough people did for me to boast about nation-wide coverage in the Netherlands.

If you _really_ want people to give you their details you're going to have to show you're for real. At the very least you should show who is running the show and how a user could connect with you. Email is fine, a likedin profile with a ton of linked people and recommendations is even better and a phone number and address also build trust. Because people see they could phone you up will stop most of them from actually doing so.

Another thing I spend a ton of time on to build trust is the FAQ. Think about what your users worry about and make those worries the top 10 questions. If you have a few bucks make sure your legal stuff is legit as well. I negotiated with a well know IT lawyer and was able to provide me and my users good legal protection. Also blog about everything.

</comment><comment><USER4> The funny thing is I could use something like this. We've been covered in Fortune and, if their logo was here, I would legitimately use this service ;).

</comment><comment><USER5> This is funny. The only thing I could suggest is that they use a subtle textured background pattern to make it even more startupy.

</comment><comment><USER6> I love it.

It is a complete and utter mockery, yet it provides real value to the the users it is mocking.

</comment><comment><USER7> Clever, although I'm not sure why NYMag and Fast Co. are more legit than CNN and Wired.

</comment><comment><USER8> Seems legit.</comment>


State Birds May Be Forced Out of Their States as the World Warms - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/climate/state-birds-climate-change.html <comment><USER2> Okay so then we'll just change the state birds?

Not that many people care about the environment.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe the bird Electoral College needs rethinking...

</comment><comment><USER4> Yet another 'may' article....

<comment><USER5> Yet another "Yet another 'may' article...." comment...?

<comment><USER4> My comment/retort would be that there is no shortage of 'may' predictive articles arguing just about anything you can think of. It would be easy to find a counter 'may' article arguing the opposite of this one, but who has time for that...

<comment><USER6> Is the hypothetical contradictory article that you assume exists, but can't be bothered to find, also backed by an extensive report from a well-regarded environmental science group?

<comment><USER4> It may do

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Jeez, when did HN get overrun by climate change denialists?

<comment><USER2> Climate change is happening and accelerated by humans.

We just don't give a shit.

<comment><USER8> I sort of give a shit. But I'm not ready to agree to a huge drop off in my standard of living, especially when there is no guarantee the developing world won't just accelerate their usage to counterbalance our cuts.

And a lot of the scare stories aren't that scary. Oh in a 100 years, half of Miami will be underwater. Okay not good. But 100 years ago Miami barely existed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Funny that they don't mention birds that may have their habitat expanded by warming, like the heat tolerant New Mexico state bird, the roadrunner.

<comment><USER6> You're right, this is wonderful news for people who love desertification.</comment></comment>


Adventures in Beam Optimization for MQTT - <AUTHOR> https://www.ably.io/blog/beam-optimization-mqtt/ <comment><USER2> > (For most messages we have to handle messages spread over multiple TCP > packets; for a two-byte message this is not an issue.)

This is a dangerous assumption. I hope they handle pings properly elsewhere if it comes in one byte at a time, or if it comes in with additional data, or if they get a two byte packet that matches the ping packet, but was just the last two bytes of a data packet.

Also, might be worth checking out unix sockets instead of TCP, this is well supported in beam now, and can be more efficient (although Linux shortcircuits a lot of TCP on localhost, I don't known how much... Anyway, you might want to run it on FreeBSD or some other OS one day that does run full TCP on localhost)</comment>


Show HN: A deck of 100 mental models to broaden your thinking - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/newest <comment><USER2> where is the deck?</comment>


A peephole optimiser for Java bytecodes (1998) - <AUTHOR> https://frippery.org/jopt/index.html <comment><USER2> I've often wondered why Java/JVM projects don't use more optimization (a la LLVM) during compilation. I understand there is some optimization at JIT time, that premature optimization can be unnecessary, it would require whole-program opts in some cases, and that tools like Proguard do have a few. But in general when I read the bytecode produced by javac, it is very much like what I wrote and I look at it knowing some optimizations I could even make by hand with regards to unused dup+pop, not re-accessing final fields, etc.

<comment><USER3> Most of these really don't matter as soon as you are using a JIT, and some that seem entirely obvious are much more problematic than you might hope.

Final field values can be changed through reflection and some other methods. The Java Language Specification allows a compiler/VM to ignore changes to final fields, but several libraries require them to be seen. So the that can't be optimised at the bytecode level.

The JIT can optimise final field access for some internal classes, and others if an option is set (see [https://shipilev.net/jvm-anatomy-park/17-trust- nonstatic-fin...](https://shipilev.net/jvm-anatomy-park/17-trust-nonstatic- final-fields/)) and in Truffle based languages like TruffleRuby ([https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby](https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby)) we can tell the JIT that certain things are truly constant, but this can't be done universally for Java.

If you're producing bytecode and you want it to run fast then your best bet is to produce bytecode that is similar to javac's as that's what Hotspot has been tuned to run fast, even if it doesn't look optimal.</comment></comment>