Programming languages are being deleted from Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fkt7t/nemerle_factor_alice_ml_and_other_programming/ <comment><USER2> Here's the main offender:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto>

One of his arguments is that these languages are often only mentioned in conference proceedings.

How you get to be a PhD student in computer science without realising that conference proceedings are the _leading distribution mechanism for knowledge_ in the CS research world is a mystery.

I may only be a humble honours student, but the central importance of conferences over journals has been drummed into me over and over by my professors.

<comment><USER3> No, of course I know that :( The problem was that the papers mentioned were either 1) not about the subject in question or 2) not cited enough to count. Hopefully your professors also drummed into you that anyone can write a paper and send it to a conference -- the kicker is if it actually makes an impact. Isn't that more-or-less the definition of notability?

None of the articles I nominated for deletion had any reliable sources to back them up. I didn't nominate them for deletion because of hard drive space. I nominated them because there was nothing to say about them barring a superficial overview of syntax.

I honestly didn't think that putting in a few AfDs would cause such a shitstorm, to the point where people are calling me a Nazi/asshole/whatnot on my user page. I also never thought my 15 minutes of fame would be for nominating Nemerle for deletion :) Maybe I should have a Wikipedia article...?

But seriously. Anyone could have commented on the AfD. Anyone could have provided reliable sources. The only thing anyone did was bitch and moan. I didn't delete the articles -- the Wikipedia administrators did. Thumbs down, internet.

<comment><USER4> My problem with you is you're going to be a professor, a profession devoted to the advancement of human knowledge and educating laymen in this knowledge, and you _just_ erased one of the main mechanisms for disseminating computer science to the general public. You just made it _harder_ to get people interested in programming. Amazing.

Instead of improving the pages (which any self-respecting graduate student could do over a cup of tea and a scone) you just erased them. Unilaterally. Imagine if someone at your university decided to do that to one of your papers because they just didn't like it or because some government thought it wasn't "notable" enough. Hell, your department would have a fit if that happened. I also bet your department publishes just about everything a Ph.D. candidate puts out, no matter how idiotic it is.

Yet, here you are, censoring the work of others in your own profession because of some arbitrary rules of "notability" that only work for dipshits like Lindsay Lohan and not for programming languages like Nemerle and Factor.

So yes, you are behaving like an asshole. You are probably a nice guy in person (any grown man who's into Pokemon has got to be fun), but right now, you're being a gigantic Nazi asshole.

<comment><USER5> >"...you're going to be a professor, a profession devoted to the advancement of human knowledge and educating laymen in this knowledge"

Correction: a professor is a profession devoted to advancing human knowledge and then locking that knowledge behind expensive paywalls so that only elites with institutional subscriptions can afford to read it. Academia couldn't care less about the knowledge available to the average internet user. You could burn all the books in the world and they wouldn't care as long as the copy in their affiliated-persons-only library stayed safe.

<comment><USER6> ...and this is why almost all academics put their papers as PDFs for free on their web sites. Have you even looked? It is times like this when I wish there was an appropriate emoticon to express an eye roll.

<comment><USER7> In another comment in this thread our deletionist actually mentioned being behind the ACM paywall as a relevant criterion for notability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The implication of deletionism as a philosophy is that readers cannot be trusted to make up their own minds about the merits of an article even if it contains positive and negative feedback markers.

The whole deletionism fiasco at Wikipedia is ultimately a software and UI failure. Misguided people who in most cases could never write a good article (or even improve an existing one) themselves are running amok because the system is re-enforcing the belief that their only talent, destroying information, is also a valid form of contribution. It is no statistical accident that rampant wiki deletionism is even more intense in ..."strict" countries such as Germany.

At the same time it is important to note that a lot of articles have serious shortcomings and are in need of improvement. While deleting them is in my opinion unforgivable as long as they contain useful information, I believe Wikipedia could profit from a more modern approach to article rating and validation. If substandard articles were allowed to continue existing albeit with low ratings and missing validation tags, Wikipedia as a process could focus more on improvement as opposed to gleeful pruning. If they concentrated on more constructive measures and included better ways of gathering user feedback for quality control, they could also provide former deletionist users with a UI option that simply prevents them from ever having to see an article that is below a certain quality threshold. Everybody would win.

As it stands today, Wikipedia increasingly fails at its stated mission of being a repository for the world's knowledge. Sadly, I don't believe it is possible to change Wikipedia in any way, ever. Someday, someone will have to come along and fork it.

<comment><USER9> > Wikipedia increasingly fails at its stated mission of being a repository for > the world's knowledge.

 _This_ is the problem. Most of us just assume that Wikipedia's mission is being the repository for all human knowledge. But it's not. The last time rampant deleting happened (and I lost a page related to one of my projects) they clearly made the argument that being an endless repository was _not_ their goal. Their goal is simply to be an encyclopedia. And even I had to admit that the page on my project is useful information but it would never belong in an encyclopedia.

If anyone wants to start a project that contains all human knowledge, on all subjects, without any constraint -- I think that would be a very interesting idea -- but that project is not Wikipedia.

<comment><USER10> Well, that project _could_ be wikipedia if the community so decided. They would just need to seriously loosen/eliminate the notability criterion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In reading about this I came across a few things that I honestly wasn't aware of for Wikipedia, which made me feel these deletionists are even more silly than I prior thought

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules>

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_paper_encyclopedia)

The Notability guidelines often both me really, as they are a somewhat silly set of 'rules' in many ways and not everything fits into a nice and tidy system. For example, Christopher M seems to feel that his understanding of the requirements if that all languages must be cited in well published and cited academic papers and there is no other way around it. That's just silly. There could be new and growing languages that are of importance, or older ones that were important at the time, but that there weren't papers for and aren't being actively used. Do they each have a purpose and for the people who is researching things via the Wikipedia important? Yes. They are.

I feel that there is more to be lost by most deletionist activity than there is to be gained. The risk evaluation here almost always (except in cases of spam and self edits, which are frequent) should lean on the side of having more information available, not less.

<comment><USER12> The one thing that has always blown my mind on Wikipedia is that they have "votes" all the time where people edit in their opinion, but then a decision is made which may or may not take the votes into account. They're actually pretty clear on this: there's a policy that says something to the effect of "yeah, we'll take votes, but the person acting on the vote doesn't have to listen to the votes because Wikipedia isn't a democracy. You're lucky if we read the votes and take them into account!".

Mindblowing.

<comment><USER13> Wikipedia's rules are all non-rules, except when they aren't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not sure what the solution is, but something seriously needs to be done about the requirements Wikipedia has in place. Especially when applied to open source software, the notability requirement, combined with the definition of reliable sources, make invalid assumptions about the common media for discourse.

<comment><USER15> Yes, yes, a million times yes. Everybody knows that the existing Wikipedia Notability guidelines have serious issues when it comes to dealing with software and technology issues. I know I fought tooth and nail to get the Steve Yegge article back on Wikipedia a while back, and Steve is pretty damn notable in his community.... to the point that a WP article on him is a no- brainer. Now imagine anybody just a hair less well known, or a project with no celebrity leader or that isn't sponsored by $MEGACORP.

Software just isn't cited generally in the New York Times and the kinds of sources that they want... that doesn't mean it isn't notable, it just means that it's "noted" a different way. Notability in our world _is_ based on blog posts, mailing list posts, github commit logs, etc.

Now how to get Wikipedia's policies amended to reflect that? Good question... I know it's been tried before and failed, but maybe it's time somebody built a coalition to make a serious, coordinated effort to get something done (no, I'm not volunteering, unfortunately.)

Edit: My memory is failing, it was the Yegge article I had that big battle over, not Zed. But the point remains the same.

<comment><USER16> Yep. The thing is that just about everything is notable at a local enough level--whether local in the sense of geography or some other community. People who tend towards the deletionist side of the debate tend to try and get around this by falling back on verifiability--but that just, ironically, ends up favoring the sort of things that get printed on dead trees somewhere however obscure. As a result, it's much easier to make a case under Wikipedia rules that some selectman in a small town who is periodically mentioned in the local newspaper is notable than someone who wrote a widely-used piece of software but hasn't been the subject of news stories. (And, of course, there's no consistent practice either. I have to assume that lots of entries about obscure toys, games, and TV shows are largely original research.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The thing that makes Wikipedia useful in my opinion is not the notable topics I can lookup somewhere else. It's these long tail articles about esoteric programming languages and non-mainstream topics.

<comment><USER18> Useful and enjoyable. The idea that there has to be top-tier publications on a language for it to be on Wikipedia will leave us with a lot of boring Wikipedia topics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I tend to contribute money to certain projects. I won't give to Wikipedia because they treat conference proceedings with less respect than an episode of Gossip Girls.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't remember who said it, but I read something recently which I thought was amusing _and not serious_ (paraphrasing):

> All that donation money, and they still can't afford enough hard drive space > to avoid deletionism.

The guy allegedly doing the flagging has responded on his user page: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto>

_Edit: The quoted comment was in jest, and too many missed this, so I'll reinforce that by adding 'and not serious'._

<comment><USER20> lets not confuse the issue. Deletionism has nothing to do with storage capacity. [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism#Rationale_for_del...](http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism#Rationale_for_deletionism)

edit: meta: the broken-down score on this post is something like +27-20, what an emotional topic!

<comment><USER12> Missed the _amusing_?

Nobody would rightfully assume that storage is the problem. I know how much storage costs. The commenter I'm quoting wrote that tongue-in-cheek, and I thought I had given enough of a hint there that I was repeating it in jest as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Christopher has posted this update on his profile:

Dear internet,

You guys win. I will stop nominating pages for deletion.

I wasn't doing this to troll or to slam any language community. I was just trying to help -- I read the WP guidelines for inclusion, and whenever I came across a language that didn't seem to meet said criteria, I nominated it for AfD. I think, with respect to Wikipedia's established notability guidelines, my arguments for deletion were airtight, which is probably why the articles were eventually deleted. I'm not sure my actions warranted the kind of internet-hatred I received as a result. If anyone thought what I was doing was wrong, they could have just sent me a friendly message and I would have politely discussed the issue. Few took this route, and I am sorry that due to time constraints and an overwhelming amount of invective I could not reply sensibly to everyone.

Since the internet seems to care more about keeping these articles than I care about deleting them, I'll stop. I personally think a lot of the articles should have been deleted. I think that ALL articles I nominated for deletion fail to meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Here's a challenge, then, for the internet: instead of spamming my Wikipedia talk page (which I don't really care about), why don't you work on fixing WP's notability guideline for programming languages? Otherwise, some other naive editor will eventually try to delete them. Perhaps they won't have as much experience dealing with trolls and flamebait as I have had, and will become very hurt and confused. Nobody wants that :(

This was fun. Now back to real work, I guess...

<comment><USER22> One deletionist got a clue. Nice! But the process or the practice is still broken, and there's a lot more good articles being lost. Hopefully someday we'll have a better wiki (my wishlist: long-term archival, forking, mergeing and fuzzy links) with a less harmful community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm working on a reference knowledge-base to complement Wikipedia that will loosen the 'notability' requirement in favor of 'true and useful'. Otherwise, it will share the same licensing and a wiki-centric edit model.

The project codename is 'Infinithree' ('∞³'), and I'm discussing it pre-launch at <http://infinithree.org> and (Twitter/Identica) @infinithree.

<comment><USER24> Sounds like an interesting project. I really don't like the name though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm sort of surprised by the surprise here. As a graduate student myself, my peers and I have all come to the sad conclusion that Wikipedia is good for breadth and bad for depth, at least in CS (I cannot speak for other areas). The primary issue seems to be the combination of deletionists and campers. The former we see in this case.

The latter is something my theory friends complain about. According to two of them who have tried, attempting to expand or correct any of the fringe topics in algorithms and graph theory is futile because of the instant-reverters who will simply revert any change they make.

Of course, what's most disturbing to me about this is... dear gods, man, you're at Princeton! If you don't understand what the contributions of Alice ML are to the field, walk down the hall and talk to Andrew Appel! Or David Walker, if Andrew is too hard to track down. I would hope that by this point this student has learned that there is a lack of fidelity in the search engines for anything published in the 90s and earlier, as the scanned PS converted to PDF is neither as well-indexed nor as comprehensively available (e.g. Springer-Verlag work from that time is frequently not indexed in scholar/citeseer due to a lack of non-subscription links, particularly if published by someone who is no longer in academia).

Fortunately, most of the work in PL was done in the lifetime of people still working. If you're too busy to do a thorough search of relevant work, you can sit down and talk with the people who were there when concurrency was first being introduced and formally modeled to understand Alice's place and contributions (or lack thereof, if that's the conclusion you come to).

<comment><USER26> What is most surprising is the claim on the Alice discussion that Ph.D theses are not reviewed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nemerle has 209,000 results on Google, and the first few pages are stacked with relevant, well-written articles. How is this not notable?

I played with this language a few years back and thought it had great promise(when C# was much less capable). I have read the exact Wikipedia page you deleted, and it got me to write some code in Nemerle.

* Btw, this might get some publicity for Nemerle (and the other languages).

</comment><comment><USER28> Ahh, time for another Wikipedia deletionist pie fight! On the one side, elitist editors who are so saddened by even a single unnecessary HD spin that they want to clean clutter. On the other side, fans of (supposedly) esoteric knowledge.

The narrator of _Foucault's Pendulum_ , when he decides to be freelance researcher, says that his main principle will be that _all_ information is equal, nothing is more precious than the other.

<comment><USER29>
      all information is equal,
      nothing is more precious than the other

I am glad Google disagrees.

Not all information is equal. But all information deserves to exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I find it funny that the guy hasn't made a single contribution to Wikipedia. All his edits either directly remove content or nominate it for deletion. Apparently besides the dislike for programming languages, he also hates it when certain scientists have "Dr." next to their names on their Wikipedia articles.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&limit=500&target=Christopher+Monsanto)

Examples:

>Raj Reddy  (dr. is so unnecessary)

>Randy Pausch  (dr is unnecessary)

>Benjamin C. Pierce  (Don't need dr.)

and so on

<comment><USER30> He also apparently thinks that once a dedicated article gets deleted, all mention of that particular subject should be removed (as is evidenced by the fact that he went on a removal spree and removed most mentions of Nemerle from other Wikipedia articles as soon as wiki:Nemerle was deleted - he didn't just delete links pointing to wiki:Nemerle but the actual mention of it). That is _not_ a WP policy.

<comment><USER31> But it is a guideline: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Red_link#Avoiding_cre...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Red_link#Avoiding_creation_of_certain_types_of_red_links)

<comment><USER32> Reread the comment. tty is not referring to changes like

      - …[[Nemerle]]…
      + …Nemerle…

He or she is claiming mentions of Nemerle being completely excised from other articles.

<comment><USER31> Oh, my mistake. I didn't read carefully and assumed tty was referring to the usual backlink removal done by a bot after AfDs - I saw one of them for Nemerle on my watchlist today before I came here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The solution to this problem that mollifies wikipedia admin culture is to make these pages into sub-pages of huge articles. E.g., <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_in_The_Simpsons> .

This is a lot less useful way of doing things but it flies almost completely outside the deletionist radar. There is little cultural dance pertaining to the the concept of notability for mentioning something in a list, and no bureaucratic pseudo-procedure for a deletionist to wield against such practice.

<comment><USER12> Whoa, hold the phone: _List of animals in The Simpsons_ is notable but _Nemerle_ isn't? How does that remotely make sense? The man hours undoubtedly expended in maintaining that list boggle my mind.

<comment><USER13> Scroll down to the List of One-Time Animals section if you really want your mind boggled

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If the problem is pollution of the main lists of programming language articles by entries that Mr. Monsanto considers to be inappropriate for listing...wouldn't an appropriate compromise be removing them from these programming languages lists? This seems like a shortcoming in Wikipedia's policies? This way the data is preserved, but not related to the main search spaces. If you look a language up on Google, it will still be there because it will be indexed.

Otherwise, Mr. Monsanto has every right to push his agenda on Wikipedia insofar as it is within the bounds of legal play on the site. Attacking his character gets nobody anywhere, and probably adds credence to whatever he's doing. If you're really concerned about deletions of your favorite PL articles, sit on them. If a request for removal/deletion (I don't know the wiki-jargon) pops up, just dump all over it. Even better, improve the articles. He can't get something deleted that's not mediocre. Agents like Mr. Monsanto will actually improve the quality of your average article one way or the other. I'm impressed that somebody would bother reading so many articles and post meta-data about them....especially on a topic that so few people engage in.

It's curious that pages that don't meet Mr. Monsanto's criterion of having been cited in a 'top-tier' publication. There are so many articles on Wikipedia that do not have ties to anything real. Is it really fair to hold PL topics to academic-level standards? What if somebody considers PL an art, or something other than semantics and formalisms? This does happen, and people who create new languages from languages that aren't considered much in the PL community might actually fall into these categories.

I think Mr. Monsanto would do well to spell out his criteria for what isn't desirable in precise and formal terms.

</comment><comment><USER33> While reading Nemerle's deletion discussion page, I can't help but notice what seems to me to be some degree of racism on the part of the deletion advocates, particularly Christopher Monsanto. Where the _many_ sources in English, instead of Polish and Russian, I can't help but think that perhaps they would not have been dismissed out of hand. RSDN.ru being dismissed as a "mere tutorial"? _Ugh!_ Read it yourself and make up your own mind though.

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Art...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Nemerle)

</comment><comment><USER34> The notability requirements do not sufficiently cover "expert" subjects like PLs. Chris mentioned this himself, yet used it as a justification for these articles, this is known as Doublethink (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink>) and clearly indicates a second agenda.

Not anyone can invent a programming language, it's not comparable to your pet rock band. Chris, you clearly displayed that you are not capable of handling this subject satisfactory and you've displayed arrogance in response to peoples distress.

Simply put - marking the articles for deletion was rash, and in the larger sense unjustified.

</comment><comment><USER35> All anyone needs to do about this is find reliable sources to improve the articles that are being nominated for deletion. Really. If some wikipedian who knows about published, reliable sources about each of the languages simply adds some source citations to the articles, all will be well.

<comment><USER36> Fun fact: I left a note for the guy asking why he doesn't do that (hunt up citations and improve articles).

His response was to go complain about how "ironic" that was on some other well-known deletionist's page, and whine about how he's "martyring" himself for Wikipedia.

In other words: there's basically no reasoning with the guy who's behind this.

<comment><USER3> I would love to do that! The problem is that for the articles I nominated, no citations exist :(

<comment><USER37> That statement is false.

Take Factor for example. It has been hosted at several conferences, has an active community of users, and has an academic paper published in ACM.

<http://factorcode.org/littledan/dls.pdf>

Perhaps what you meant to say is that no citations exist that meet your own apparently arbitrary standards of approval?

Edit:

It appears that it was another individual who recommended wiki/Factor for deletion. I apologize for my inaccurate accusation, but in my opinion that still does not excuse recommending the removal of Nemerle.

<comment><USER3> But I didn't nominate Factor for deletion...

<comment><USER37> I apologize for the confusion, but that still doesn't change much. See these papers on Nemerle:

[http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/events/sscli2005/pachols...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/events/sscli2005/pacholski-moskal.pdf)

[http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/moskal/pdf/msc...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/moskal/pdf/msc.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Programming languages are like Pokemon. Only a few of them are strictly notable in isolation (Pikachu). But there are hundreds of others that small communities are interested in, and the metavalue of having all of them described on Wikipedia is high.

I don't understand what the cost is. Why don't you make a list of "notable" programming languages so that people who want to browse around can skip the less influential / new ones like Nemerle. But to delete hundreds of languages (and if you apply these rules, you need to delete hundreds of languages, you've missed lots of them) is a travesty.

</comment><comment><USER39> @chrismonsanto has this thread (and the reddit thread) caused you to reevaluate what we, the programming community, consider 'notable'?

The easy reaction would be to focus on the flamers, harden your heart and drive ahead. The wise man, here, stops and thinks for a bit.

Restore Nemerle.

<comment><USER33> He's a wikipedia admin. It is commonly recognized fact that all wikipedia admins are on egotistical power-trips, what do you think is going to happen?

You will _never_ see an admission of wrongdoing.

<comment><USER40> Thankfully, he is _not_ an admin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's about time someone created a anti-deletionist (inclusionist?) Wikipedia overlay that keeps copies of pages that have been deleted. Perhaps some kind of framing, while ugly, could be used to keep server load to a minimum while allowing people to access all of Wikipedia through that overlay site.

<comment><USER42> The _vast_ majority of deleted pages are utter crap. While what you suggest would be interesting I don't see it having much value, unless you manually selected which pages to include. Even then, they'd be 99.9% stubs, with nobody editing or expanding them.

We just need to deal with deletionism.

<comment><USER33> _"The vast majority of deleted pages are utter crap."_

So fucking what?

Bits are so cheap they're damn near free, and we have pretty good search technology these days. Who gives a shit if there is some crusty data that nobody cares about lying around?

Who _precisely_ is hurt by this?

<comment><USER43> There's a big difference between CSD ("Criterion for Speedy Deletion") and AfD ("Articles for Deletion") here.

Something like Nemerle is obviously an interesting article and a failure of the AfD process. I've never done a DRV (Deletion Review) before, so I might look through Christopher Monsanto's deletions.

But there ARE good reasons to delete content. I new page patrol on English Wikipedia and see thousands of articles created which are nothing more than:

"asdfasdfasdf tim in year 6 of somesuch high school is teh GAY!!1"

and they should rightly be deleted. Usually they are CSDed within minutes and usually deleted very quickly thereafter.

The CSD process works for this kind of thing. And occasionally things slip past the CSD process and need PROD/PROD BLP/AfD. But I do think the Nemerle deletion was definitely an example of the fallacy of deletionism.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, because 65 bytes is a hell of a thing to waste.

<comment><USER43> It isn't a hard drive space issue. All deleted articles are kept in the database.

Are you seriously advocating that if someone comes and posts an article in main-space which is nothing but an advert for a crappy little garage band or some kid creating an article about how his friends are gay or whatever shouldn't be deleted?

<comment><USER33> Yeah, so what? No harm is done. Revert bad changes to articles people care about, and ignore articles that nobody cares about. If people actually someone start visiting these 'bad' articles, that means nothing more than you've just identified another avenue for expansion.

<comment><USER42> That turns Wikipedia into geocities, which is not its role or purpose. There have to be criteria for inclusion. If you have a bunch of articles with unverifiable information, you aren't doing your job as an encyclopedia. Quality matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Getting people to rally around anything that someone is trying to have deleted is a sure-fire way to get it deleted, protected from recreation, and basically never coming back. It is like some kind of 'defend the hive' kind of reaction.

</comment><comment><USER45> It's interesting that there is no longer a Nemerle article on the English Wikipedia, but there is one on the Japanese, Polish, Russian, Finnish, Tajik, Ukrainian, and Chinese Wikipedias.

You can see this by going to, e.g., the Japanese article (<http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle>) and looking at the language links at bottom of the left sidebar.

So if you are a speaker of one of those languages, you're still in luck :-P

<comment><USER46> I'm Russian and I almost never read Russian wikipedia articles about programming.

Reasons: a) Terminology is English and looks very unnatural in Russian. Terminology translation is even worse - when I read in Russian I need to make double translation to understand.

      b) Most Russian wiki articles - is just translations from English wiki.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Wikipedia is about power and the kick you get out of it.

<comment><USER29> Well, it certainly seems to lack sufficient guards against people who are on a power trip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> When a graduate student, a researcher, spends so much effort in order to delete knowledge (or, more precisely, hide it), I find it mind-boggling. It goes against the very essence of science.

<comment><USER48> But it's right in line with the worst petty academic pissing matches.

Like the California math professor who was recently arrested for repeatedly peeing on his colleague's office door.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I certainly oppose deleting programming languages, obscure or not, from wikipedia. I went to the site to try to register a complaint but could not find a way to do that. It seems that meta-comments are not really handled well withing the wikipedia framework. Or did I just miss the right link.

<comment><USER50> I think wikipedia (like some other sites I have tried to use) is intentionally obscure; it gives the "Wikipedia is my life" types more control.

<comment><USER32> Oh, come on, now. It's just that the wiki paradigm is used throughout. Talk pages, for example, are basically no differently editable from their respective articles; Talk:Transport_in_Nagpur is just a plain ol' wiki page that's been created at that name. Hanlon's razor, et cetera, et cetera.

<comment><USER49> It seemed to me that everything is tied to a particular page or entry/ There did not seem to be any appropriate place to bring up a pervasive action involving a multiplicity of pages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I recently created an article about Sunder Katwala (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunder_Katwala>) who is the head of the Fabian Society (a prominent UK think tank).

The article had been up for less than a month when someone requested speedy deletion, despite the article having ample evidence of the subject's notability. Deletionists are out of control on Wikipedia, and need to be stopped. I've thought about writing articles and though "no, why bother, some deletionist will just delete it." and I'm sure many others have been similarly dissuaded.

To this end I'm building an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia. The main difference it will have is there will be no notability guidelines, only verifiability ones.

<comment><USER43> That's never been tried before. Except with Citizendium, Deletionpedia, Knowino, Wikinfo, Includipedia...

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The Nemerle article is up for deletion review (DRV), and there is at least one admin supporting overturning the decision:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2011_February_14)

</comment><comment><USER52> Information on these type of languages is exactly what I expect to find in an encyclopaedia.

</comment><comment><USER53> There was a time when I didn't understand the need for Wikipedia, as I figured every kind of information would just be retrievable with Google (or another search engine).

Now Google and Wikipedia are failing at the same time. Bad.

</comment><comment><USER54> Somebody just created a new stub for Alice ML and Nemerle. Let's start filling them out!

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle_(programming_language)> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_(programming_language)>

_edit_ Nemerle appears to have been frozen and deleted

Alice has gone down 3 or 4 times, but it's now up for the last 10 minutes.

They're down again, looks like semi-permanently.

</comment><comment><USER55> So, what languages were deleted? How much disk space was reclaimed by the deletion? How much bandwidth will that spare?

If someone thinks the language is not notable, there is a discussion page attached to the main article where such things can be expressed. The obscurity of the language can also be communicated in the article itself. While lots of us can be pretty sure Nemerle will have no lasting impact in the field, they can be wrong.

<comment><USER32> _How much disk space was reclaimed by the deletion_

None, articles can be restored. Disk space is actually consumed by deletion overhead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Wikipedia has had deletion issues for a very long time. Note that there are also vague rules that allow admins a procedure called "Speedy Deletion". It lets them remove content w/o debate or public visibility. The deleted page, and all discussions about it just disappear (only an admin on Wikipedia can recover it).

One criteria that can be used for Speedy Deletion is:

        No indication of importance (individuals, animals, organizations, web content)

See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_d...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion)

It's a very subjective measure, yet it encourages over-zealous Wikipedians to expunge content.

The spam problem is _very real_ for any user generated web site. I think it would be more ideal if Wikipedia didn't delete anything - but rather marked pages as being of low quality, or not meeting their standards, and perhaps removing those pages from their search index.

Here's what I wrote about this problem in 2007:

<http://faves.com/users/mike/dot/76699957085>

</comment><comment><USER57> I believe there are specific requirements for something to be considered "notable" on wikipedia. Simply fulfill those requirements for each language page and you're good, no?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability>

<comment><USER32> Have you read any of the discussion? It's a contentious issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> This kind of stupid crap is why I and many people no longer contribute to wikipedia.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm offended on behalf of all of the smaller projects who basically just got told that their work is worthless.

I'm also offended that the value of a project seems to be based on how well someone can market it. If your project hasn't made a name for itself, then it's worthless, right? Personally, I'm content to hack away on things that no one has heard of because I enjoy what I'm doing. If someone else happens to find it useful, that's awesome. However, deleting things from the Mecca of knowledge-seekers in an attempt to purify it in this manner is nothing short of crapping on the ideals that Wikipedia was built on.

</comment><comment><USER59> The two main arguments for why these articles should not be deleted are:

1) The languages exist, are supported, and are used by many users

2) There are other bad articles on wikipedia

Both of these are, unfortunately, terrible arguments.

In response to the first argument:

Wikipedia's rules state that for an article to exist, it must be proven notable by certain types of accepted references. That does not include tutorials, blog posts, software's official website, or questions on support websites/forums. These rules are unfortunate, and have been sources of much arguing, but they still stand.

We, as programmers, get upset when information that is useful to us is removed. The rules exist for a reason, though; one place where they are often enforced is the addition of video game articles. There are hundreds of thousands of video games with significant user bases. Wikipedia has made it a point that it does not intend to be a catalog of software that exists, and for that reason video game articles are deleted often. In order for software to legitimately qualify for an article, it must be significantly, demonstrably important. Existence and popularity is not enough.

In response to the second type of argument: existence of violations does not justify other violations. If don't think the blue slime from Dragon Warrior deserves its own wikipedia page, mark it for deletion and argue your point, but don't reference it as why your bad article with weak references should remain.

Wikipedia has a LOT of articles that are against its rules. We have become used to these, and depend on them, so we get upset when the rules are enforced. Have a look at the actual rules and I'll bet you can identify plenty of articles you have read that are in violation:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not>

</comment><comment><USER60> Though, I can see Christoper's Point of view, I wonder about the cost-benefit of this kind a cleanup would be. The main reason seems to be to unclutter the listing of topics in wikipedia. How many people navigate Wikipedia through lists, isn't search more often used? In which case the central argument behind deleting factual information would be more costly than beneficial(even though it doesn't live up to wikipedia' notability standard).

BTW, Why the hostility? and the mob mentality. I thought he articulated his arguments clearly and quite well without malice.

</comment><comment><USER61> I saw that the language he is working on for his PhD was listed on Wikipedia and flagged for deletion. Then I saw that that page had initially been created that same day solely for the purpose of marking it for deletion.

Seriously, person who did this? I thought wasting time browsing news sites like HN and reddit was bad enough but this... this proves that the internet is a very serious business indeed.

</comment><comment><USER62> I think this is absolutely appalling.

</comment><comment><USER54> Great discussion on wikipedia about this

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_\(policy\)#Lets_discuss_notability_.22policy.22_.28again.29)

<comment><USER63> Why not just formalize WikiProject rankings? Instead of being deleted, all articles with verifiable, independent sources should be graded on quality and importance by those involved in the relevant WikiProject(s).

I think exposing that kind of metadata would be really, really useful.

<comment><USER54> I think the biggest problem I have with the notability guidelines is that none of the editors (pedantic as they tend to be) understand what the word "guideline" means. Most of the AfD discussions center around WP:N. Yet notability is a scarily vague and personal criteria. In this case, the original deletion discussion appeared to be 100% in favor of keeping the articles in question with only Monsanto against. The only apparent question was WP:N and despite quite a bit of evidence demonstrating notability, the editor appeared to unilaterally delete the articles.

In other words, this demonstrates that the burden of proof, why an article must be included in AfD cases, is on the people who wish for it to be included. If you aren't personally monitoring thousands of articles that you may or may not be interested in _at that moment_ , you may never even have a chance to participate in an AfD discussion! And if you don't participate, the article gets deleted (or even if you do participate, like in this case, the article gets deleted). The default outcome of the process is to delete, it's fundamentally a knowledge removal operation without any clear method for ensuring continued inclusion! Talk about a process that doesn't make any sense.

So in this particular case, a single individual, unable to recall these languages off the top of his head, flagged these articles for AfD, the discussion voted all to keep, he cited WP:N and BAM! they're all gone.

If this "process" as it were were applied across all of wikipedia (suppose every article in WP were flagged AfD) then we'd be left with only the most famous proper nouns that most people could be reasonably expected to know already as common knowledge! What's the point of WP then?

<comment><USER56> Can you please not use undefined Wikipedia terminology here? I have no idea what AfD and WP:N are referring to.

<comment><USER54> Apologies, it's terribly easy to drop into jargonland when discussing Wikipedia.

AfD is "Article for Deletion".

WP:N are the notability guidelines Wikipedians are supposed to use when deciding if something is notable enough to be included and to keep out one-off topics.

<comment><USER56> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The sleeping bag that charges your phone while you sleep - <AUTHOR> http://blog.vodafone.co.uk/2013/06/12/vodafone-unveils-the-future-of-festival-season-tech-charge-your-phone-while-you-sleep/ <comment><USER2> These things look like huge ads to me, they remind me of the clothing in "Idiocracy". That impression is increased by the fact that they're currently not all that useful: 8 hours sleep for 11 hours standby means you _still_ need to charge normally, so you might as well just stick to that. Of course, this is going to become better and better, but right now it strikes me as a marketing gag more than anything else.

<comment> jon-wood It almost certainly is, similar to Vodafone's solar charging umbrellas that they took to festivals[1]. Having seen the creator talking about it they're entirely unviable commercially, and were incredibly fragile.

[1] [http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/13/vodafone-booster- brolly/](http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/13/vodafone-booster-brolly/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, awesome to have technology that _extracts_ (pumps) heat out of the sleeping bag, that sounds really intuitive.

I thought the point of sleeping bags was to _trap_ the heat for as long as possible, insulating you from the cold exterior climate?

<comment><USER4> Exactly, this makes the sleeping bag less comfortable. It doesn't actually pump the heat though, it flows from hot to cold on it's own. It's actually like a turbine that turns the flow into electricity.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would you pay for fuzzing as a service? - <AUTHOR> Fuzzing has discovered security vulnerabilities in a lot of production code, and generates useful test cases for programs - http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/
It requires a lot of computational power, since it tries random (guided) inputs into the program.
Would you pay for a SaaS product that discovers security vulnerabilities/generates interesting test cases using a fuzzer like AFL? <comment><USER2> Such a product exists: [https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/](https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/) . It's pretty good and we pay $199/month. But they have not been active recently and the company may be dying without enough business to support them.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, Tinfoil's got a good product. They're definitely still active and I think they're business is doing pretty well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I tried to create one of these a few months ago [https://github.com/frewsxcv/lop.farm](https://github.com/frewsxcv/lop.farm)

Send me an email if you want to team up on this: firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


DoD launches winner-take-all multibillion-dollar cloud-computing bidding - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/03/07/pentagon-kicks-off-a-winner-take-all-among-tech-companies-for-multi-billion-dollar-cloud-computing-contract/ <comment><AUTHOR> You can bet this will go to Amazon or a shell company for Amazon. Literally everyone internal with whom I talk about using one of other clouds just asks me why I don't use AWS. It's like they haven't even heard of Microsoft, and they are unaware that Google has cloud services. There is no discussion internally. It's AWS or GTFO. If it's not AWS, it will be a shell company owned by the cousin of a well-connected Washington insider, layering some horseshit contracting shim between them and AWS bare metal.</comment>


Yahoo, AOL results biased in favor of parent company Verizon's websites - <AUTHOR> https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/verizon-media-search.html <comment><USER2> For all the worries about tech monopolies and oligopolies, I am always more worried about the ISP's and their power.

<comment><USER3> Them and the ecosystem of data brokers and marketing companies that are invisible to consumers and yet do far, _far_ sketchier things with personal data.

Like, remember that thing where cell carriers were literally selling real-time user-specific location data to, essentially, anybody who could pay? And probably still are? I can't conceive of how people can be so angry at "Big Tech" but not at these shadowy fuckers who are doing so much worse things wrt. your data.

<comment><USER4> You are setting a false dichotomy. Most people that care about privacy are angry at _both_ ISP stalkers _and_ BigTech stalkers.

That being said, BigTech has developed significant stronger capabilities for aggregating and exploiting the data at scale, and using it for manipulating mass behavior. It's their business model: serve ads and curate content for maximum $$$ and engagement. For better or worse, ISPs just pass bits around on behalf of their customers, without deciding which bits to show and which to hide. Given the death of net neutrality things may change, but for now ISPs have a lot of ground to cover to become as noxious as BigTech.

<comment><USER5> > For better or worse, ISPs just pass bits around on behalf of their > customers, without deciding which bits to show and which to hide

Comcast does DPI and will inject "warnings" into your port 80 traffic if they see you downloading bits they disapprove of. They've also been caught blocking sites multiple times; it is always a "mistake", but somehow also always something like this:

[https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/03/07/comcast- xfinity-...](https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/03/07/comcast-xfinity- paypal-net-neutrality/)

You're also forgetting Verizon's magic headers, various carriers' zero rating, mining DNS requests, AT&T's Room 641A, and about 50 years of other charming behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can someone explain to me how this is problematic? If you go to a grocery store, you will see store-brand items promoted too. They will be cheaper and possibly more prominent on the shelves than name-brand items. They might even be in disguise (e.g. Archer Farms is a Target brand).

How is this any worse or wrong?

<comment><USER7> They're often cheaper because the store increases the price of the competitors' wares to make their own store-product more appealing. It increases the price to consumers.

Can't both practices be wrong?

Grocery stores shouldn't be allowed to sell their own brands that compete with the otherwise free market. It's an abuse of their position in the value chain. Heinz Ketchup can't compete with the store brand on equal terms when the store sets the prices for both products.

<comment><USER6> > Can't both practices be wrong? and an abuse of their market position?

Sure. But my point is that no one is railing Kroger for putting their cheap pasta above the DeCecco. So it's hypocritical to call out tech companies for doing what physical retailers have been doing for ages.

If we're not mad about the pasta, we shouldn't be mad about Flickr being #2 on the search for "photos". And if we are mad about Google Photos being #1, why aren't we mad about the pasta?

<comment><USER7> I'm mad about the pasta too. Price gouging is usually regulated internationally, though. E.g. groceries in India are labeled with a maximum retail price set by the manufacturer to avoid problems like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm quite sure I see Google products and services on top of Google search.

<comment><USER9> And Google gets scrutinized for that. Now it's Verizon's turn. It's good to know what and when these companies are doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Verizon Media-owned search engines have decreased from a market share of > 4,10 % in February 2019 to 3,63 % in the United States in February 2020, > according to StatCounter Global Stats. 3,63 % of the internet-connected > population of the US is roughly 10,6 million people.

It's pretty safe to say the only people using those search engines are people who really like aol or yahoo properties for some reason.

<comment><USER11> > It's pretty safe to say the only people using those search engines are > people who really like aol or yahoo properties for some reason.

People who use Yahoo/ AOL are people who use those sites out of habit and are happier with the crap experience they get there than learning new technologies. My mom and one of my former bosses were tied to Yahoo & AOL respectively and it was 100% just the comfort of the devil they knew.

<comment><USER12> My grandmother (before she passed) used Yahoo as her homepage and main search from there... It's what I originally put on her computer long before Yahoo got bad, and it's what she stuck with as a result. It was actually painful to see...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is truly terrifying that people still use Yahoo and AOL

<comment><USER14> I logged into my old yahoo mail account the other day and was surprised to find it had some interesting upgrades, such as views for emails containing photos and receipts. It was a fun way to time travel.

In fact, except for (or maybe due to) the entirely blank pane on the right that presumably has a bunch of ads blocked, looks cleaner and more appealing than what gmail has become.

<comment><USER15> Yahoo's email client is one of the best in terms of usability.

The story there is that Marissa Mayer wanted employees to use it internally, so it got heavily dogfooded and improved. (Yahoo employees were using Google docs and sheets for company use like password lists. lol.)

It's worked as your described above for a few years, but they claim to have made speed improvements recently (as it was unusable on low-end devices like netbooks.)

The problem with Yahoo Mail is that Mayer allowed a FISA order to install a kernel-level sniffing module on email servers, and I never heard if that was removed (interpret that as a no.) In addition, their network was pwned multiple times, so there's that too.

[https://www.engadget.com/2016/10/08/reuters-yahoo-email- scan...](https://www.engadget.com/2016/10/08/reuters-yahoo-email-scanning- done-using-a-linux-kernel-module)

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/16/yahoo_forged_cookie...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/16/yahoo_forged_cookie_hack_risk/)

Source: ex-Yahoo, offered role as technical lead of Mail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Are these results surprising? Probably not. But does that mean we shouldn't talk about them? Because that's what (a portion of) this comment section seems to think.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is the story that this is happening or that people are honestly surprised this is happening.

<comment><USER18> It's not happening at that _other_ , reputable search engine.

Of course if you take pride in cynic nihilism, nothing bad will surprise you. But lowering your standards very quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You'll get your entirely corrupt politicians, for example. Because the honest ones leave after a few years of being constantly called "corrupt" or "stupid" with zero connection between what they are actually doing and the feedback they get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If I have a search engine and I create some other services that I believe are better than competitors' services, shouldn't I be putting my other services at the top of search results?

</comment><comment><USER20> That'd be a problem if anybody ever used them

</comment><comment><USER21> This "study" for sure doesn t prove anything. And fore sure not a bias. How do you know that the other search engine are not bias either?

</comment><comment><USER22> NOOOOO How could this be?

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm shocked, shocked, to see favoritism going on in this establishment /s

</comment><comment><USER24> I think the real news here is that people still use these search engines. :D

<comment><USER25> "OneSearch" is completely new to me. I know Yahoo has a decent market in Asia, Japan I believe. I'm always surprised to see AOL mentioned in any context outside of history anymore.

<comment><USER26> Such an uninspired name.

<comment><USER7> It's an old codename for Yahoo! Search's in-house search engine. Back in the day when they still had one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> And how is this different than Google?

</comment><comment><USER28> Could it be that Google is biased? Why everything is biased when compared to Google?

<comment><USER29> They weren't just being compared to Google. They were mostly being compared to Bing. Remember, the underlying data provider for Verizon's search results is Bing. When compared to other Bing-powered search engines, the ordering of results should be nearly identical.

<comment><USER30> There's no universal guidelines for (document|query) rankings so the "bias" is always going to be very hard to find a smoking gun for. The appearance of bias in the rankings is a real issue that companies (and regulators?) should care about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Putting this out there in case folks aren't aware:

DuckDuckGo is powered almost entirely by Yahoo!. In turn, Yahoo! search is powered almost entirely by Bing.

<comment><USER32> No we're not.

<comment><USER33> even on bing ?

<comment><USER34> epi0Bauqu is the founder of DuckDuckGo, he will know.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Analytics infographic presentation-ready reports - <AUTHOR> http://app.whatagraph.com/ <comment><USER2> there is no preview, it would be nice to have one</comment>


Show HN: Social in Brief – a weekly social media report to your email - <AUTHOR> https://socialinbrief.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, I am the lead developer of this project. I am super excited that we have finally launched this project! Let me know if you have any questions or feedback about it.</comment>


Free Stanford Class with Steve Blank - <AUTHOR> http://www.launchpad-class.org/

<comment><USER2> Is there any information about how the class will work?

The non-virtual version of this class is heavily team based, and people are expected to go and find customers and actually talk to them(!). The workload is also quite heavy - I believe around 20 hours per week.

How will the team part work for the online class?

Edit: also, on the off chance anyone is thinking about teams already, I'd be interested in talking.

<comment><USER3> Not sure if I'm smart enough to figure out how to make teams work virtually for 1,000's of thousands of students at a time. (Can't figure out how to grade progress on this scale.)

I'm leaning to have the class teach individual entrepreneurs the basics of how to build a startup using the business model canvas, customer development and agile engineering.

Think of it as a step-by-step guide to building a startup. An advanced version of the Four Steps to the Epiphany updated for web/mobile/cloud, etc.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER4> You could have other students do collaborative "grading" for certain assignments, much like students vote on which questions get asked.

For example, the assignment is to pick a method for reaching customers. I describe my business and propose five methods for reaching clients. To get feedback, I then have to vote on five other student's ideas about how they would reach clients.

Whichever method the students choose is the best for me, I have to do.

Students can also note which ideas for reaching clients seem particularly good or particularly poor. You can cull the top of these annotations to discuss the ones of broadest use for the class to understand.

I think the principles of your approach are simple enough (and that's a good thing) that for basic grading you could crowdsource it. It's not as good as being able to pick your brain, but it's still pretty good. You could then use the voting method to find the biggest wins and the most useful fail-cases to discuss in class.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also <http://www.entrepreneur-class.org/>

<comment><USER6> What do you guys make of those two classes, which one would you choose if you had only time for one of them ?

(asking because right now AI and ML require quite some time and I want to do other technical classes starting january ^^)

<comment><USER3> I'd take Chuck Eesley's class first. The Lean LaunchPad class is a methodology driven version of the 2012 update to the Four Steps to the Epiphany.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it would have been better if they had created all the Stanford Classes under single domain rather to have different for each one of them.

<comment><USER8> Or at least have a greater www.stanford-classes.edu, to show all of them. But the need for a own domain, is to make it easier when the class really starts. Its easier, to use your own domain, that have a leanlauchlab.stanford.edu.

But the point is, its a wonderful news! Congrats Stanford!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a life time opportunity any entrepreneur or a soon-to-be entrepreneur will never like to miss. Specially those who are not in US or out of Valley.

</comment><comment><USER10> I am no quite sure if I should take this class - or the Entrepreneurship one for that matter. I am busy start a startup. This classes will probably take quite some time and I can't really imagine, what I could possibly learn form them, that I haven't picked up from various resources linked here over time. What do you think?

<comment><USER11> So there is nothing Steve Blank could teach you that you don't already know? Besides, these classes involve getting into teams and trying out the concepts from class (and might have read about on HN) in the real world. I think you might learn a lot.

<comment><USER10> Of cause I am not saying that he could not teach me anything. I just can't imaging that it will be worth the time-investment. I didn't realize that the online student will also work in teams, that actually makes me even less inclined to take part. Working on another project, will be a even bigger distraction from my own startup.

<comment><USER12> Learning about startups while starting your own is a balance everyone has to consider for themselves. Depending on how much you already know about startups, a class could either be an eye-opening epiphany which will save you years of work wasted because of silly mistakes, or a waste of time repeating what you already know.

Beware of the Dunning-Kruger effect when deciding which you'll be. I've met one too many founders with an attitude of "I'm too busy working hard to stop and think" that could really have benefited from stopping, stepping back, and reconsidering some of their major assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What a great opportunity! For someone like me who lives in India, this is a fantastic opportunity to learn from Steve Blank himself.

His book has changed the way I work but I feel there is a whole world of difference in actually learning from him in a class room format, doing exercises and taking it step by step.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow this is absolutely fantastic news. I'm thoroughly excited - I want to take them all!

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm really excited by this and the other online classes. Has anyone else taken these? I'm wondering if I've over done it with the sign ups.

</comment><comment><USER16> Has anyone gotten any type of response post sign up?

<comment><USER17> Nope. But I didnt get one from the current AI and ML either, if I remember correctly.</comment></comment>


Ex-Microsoft manager plans to create first U.S. marijuana brand - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/30/usa-marijuana-idUSL2N0EB0YA20130530

<comment><USER2> > Shively is planning to lay out his plans, along with his vision for a future > in which marijuana will be legally imported from Mexico, at a Thursday news > conference in downtown Seattle.

If a brand is seeking to be a mark of quality, then he is looking to import from the wrong country.

I have never been to these places but I'm guessing the typical shops where medical marijuana is dispensed in California don't sell the sorts of "schwag" that you see come from Mexico.

However, I suppose growers in Mexico could produce better quality Marijuana if the market were to shift against their product.

</comment><comment><USER3> If they don't name a blend 'Land-o-smiles' I'll be very disappointed.</comment>


The End of Coal Could Be Closer Than It Looks - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-10-09/the-end-of-coal-could-be-closer-than-it-looks <comment><USER2> Hopefully so..</comment>


These zoo live cams let you hang out with pandas, giraffes, and other animals - <AUTHOR> https://www.travelandleisure.com/attractions/zoos-aquariums/virtual-zoo-live-animal-cams <comment><USER2> if you are not enjoying your temporary confinement think of these poor animals who have to endure it for the rest of their lives.

<comment><USER3> Sad to see this comment being downvoted.

I can't believe people still do this to animals in most countries...

<comment><USER4> It's anthropomorphising. Animals in a properly sized and well-made habitat aren't in distress.

<comment><USER5> How do you know that? Descartes believed that animals couldn't feel pain. We're all shocked by that now, but he could have (in fact probably did) use an argument similar to "that's anthropomorphising".

There's a long history of humans making claims about what animals don't experience, in order to justify how we treat them, only to later discover evidence that overturns the claims. It seems to me that this has to be the default explanation for zoos as well.

<comment><USER6> How do you know plants don't feel pain?

<comment><USER7> Not sure why you are asking this, but there's evidence that plants do feel pain.

At least some can emit chemicals to signal to others of their species that they are infested with harmful insects so other plants can begin producing toxins to protect themselves from infestation. Some also emit a pulse when damaged, which one might think if as kind of like a scream, though it's not anything humans can perceive with our innate senses.

(At least, not most of us. There may be exceptions. Some humans are abnormally good at sensing magnetic north, etc.)

<comment><USER4> A stimulus reaction isn't the same thing as "feeling pain", which requires a certain level of consciousness. It's debatable if even lobsters for example have the necessary development.

<comment><USER8> Haha serotonin printer go brrr

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's also some live cameras from the Melbourne Zoo in Australia.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS9UBqaUtoIXUhX0J1BnxwQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS9UBqaUtoIXUhX0J1BnxwQ)

</comment><comment><USER10> It doesn't help now (at least not live, but you can watch highlights) but there are some webcams at Brooks Falls in Katmai, where bears famously congregate each summer to fish the salmon run. I watched quite a few good shots last June/July. Probably plenty of other webcams on that site I have yet to check out.

[https://explore.org/livecams/brown-bears/brooks-falls- brown-...](https://explore.org/livecams/brown-bears/brooks-falls-brown-bears- low)

</comment><comment><USER11> That Georgia Aquarium cam is awesome. I now need an AR layer that identifies whatever is swimming past.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yup, just like going to the zoo in person. The first link I tried was the San Diego Zoo's Panda Cam, and all I saw was an image empty any pandas.

</comment><comment><USER13> I heard that the zoo animals are super relaxed because they don't have to care about human visitors staring then down

</comment><comment><USER14> Thanks for that. Will be much appreciated by the parents of a two-year-old in locked-down UK. :-)</comment>


How Google Sees Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://blog.risingstack.com/how-google-sees-node-js/#

<comment><USER2> I find the comparison of location between Node.JS and PHP quite interesting. I wonder what it is about those locations and/or the languages themselves that makes them more popular in China or North America.</comment>


Bitcoin price crashes after the SEC rejects the Winklevoss twins ETF - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-price-crashes-after-the-sec-rejects-the-wiklevoss-twins-etf-2017-3 <comment><USER2> This is a bit of an exaggeration. Bitcoin only lost the last two weeks of gains, but is still over $1100.

</comment><comment><USER3> and swiftly begins to recover, faster than i expected too</comment>


Engare: a video game about the mathematical beauty of Islamic art - <AUTHOR> https://killscreen.com/articles/engare-a-videogame-about-the-mathematical-beauty-of-islamic-art/ <comment><USER2> The drawing tool is mentioned. Video at Brahami's site: [http://www.engare.design/drawing- tool/#contactPage](http://www.engare.design/drawing-tool/#contactPage)

</comment><comment><USER3> wouldn't that be 'Persian' (culture) art as opposed to 'islamic' (religious) art?

/splitting hairs

<comment><USER4> It is indeed Persian art. The arabs didn't really have much in terms of art or culture coming from a bedouin culture, they conquered the Persians, forcibly converted them to Islam, and subsumed their art. Most of what we know as "islamic" is actually Persian, spread by arab conquerors.</comment></comment>


Memcached: More Cache = Less Cash - <AUTHOR> http://www.rackspacecloud.com/blog/2009/07/29/memcached-more-cache-less-cash/

<comment> brown9-2 Can someone who knows mysql well explain why the entire query cache for a table is thrown out whenever an update/insert/delete is made to the table?

Sounds very "baby with the bathwater"-ish.

The author of the article kind of makes it sound like this issue with mysql is the primary reason to use memcached. I'm sure not every RDBMS has the same issue (and I'm sure there are lots of other reasons to use memcached).

<comment><USER2> Cache invalidation is a deceptively difficult problem.

The direct answer is because it's pretty difficult to figure out how an insert/update/delete is going to affect all the various queries stored in the cache... without running them all again. And of course you're not going to rerun all the queries again on the off chance you might need them in the future; you're just going to throw them out of the cache and regenerate them the next time they're needed.

Note that this seems like an unfair comparison. I don't think many people consider MySQL's transparent query cache a substitute for the (not transparent) Memcache. Better would be memcache versus using a regular table in a MySQL DB as a cache (many popular PHP CMSes do this).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In the Facebook scale or similar scales if one relies only on OS instead of extra cache layers what would be the numbers? With this pace we would be talking about power efficient SRAM based caches in 10 years.</comment>


T-Mobile's Binge on Violates Key Net Neutrality Principles [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/downloads/vanSchewick-2016-Binge-On-Report.pdf <comment><USER2> This is how net neutrality dies, if we're not careful. As a T-Mobile customer I browse /r/tmobile every now and then. It's an odd place, full of "fans" of T-Mobile (a concept I can't wrap my head around - users literally have flairs of "bleeding magenta"!), and the net neutrality debate there is fascinating. In short, many think this is not a net neutrality violation because any service can be accepted as part of "Binge On" if they apply to it. It is not anti-competitive, thus, not a net neutrality violation.

Thing is, they're not wrong, per se. Because there isn't an actual accepted definition for "net neutrality". For me, it's strict - the carrier is carrying bits and bytes, and doesn't know/care what they are. For others, it is an anti-competition stance.

Here's the problem: "Binge On" is great, in theory. Unlimited video! Even as a die-hard net neutrality supporter, next time I'm staying in a hotel with expensive wi-fi, I could load up Netflix on my phone and Chromecast it to the TV. Awesome. What's the net neutrality counter argument that is equally as enticing to customers? It's a tough sell.

<comment><USER3> I'm T-Mobile user and on every their survey I let them know that I oppose their violation of Net neutrality and they should stop Binge On. Also you can tell them that since they are allowing caps exemptions, it means that caps have nothing to do with network congestion and they should stop using them altogether.

 _> Thing is, they're not wrong, per se. Because there isn't an actual accepted definition for "net neutrality"._

It is wrong, and definition is pretty straightforward. Net neutrality means no preferential treatment for any traffic. Here some services get exemption from caps, while other don't. It is clearly a preferential treatment for some traffic. From a different standpoint, Net neutrality means that network provider can't serve as a gatekeeper and decide who gets better traffic and who doesn't. Here they are the gatekeeper and services need to ask them for permission to be exempt from caps. Gatekeeper = violation of Net neutrality.

<comment><USER4> >Net neutrality means no preferential treatment for any traffic.

I don't know how this can be open to interpretation, by anyone. self-described "t-mobile fan" or not.

<comment><USER3> It's not open to interpretation to any honest person. Those who try using weasel logic around it are those who want to violate it. And they know perfectly well they are being crooked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem for Net Neutrality advocates is that T-Mobile's customers don't care one bit. They love the fact that they don't have to pay for streaming video and that they pay less for video on non-supported services. It is even causing customers of other carriers to ask their carriers to not be net neutral so that they can save money. This is one case where net neutrality is not anti-consumer or anti-competitive and it is hurting the net neutrality case to make such a big deal about it.

<comment><USER2> _This is one case where net neutrality is not anti-consumer or anti- competitive and it is hurting the net neutrality case to make such a big deal about it._

I disagree. What if I want to use my phone connection to remote desktop into servers a lot? I don't get a BingeOn allowance for that. Why not?

<comment><USER6> T-mobile won't give you the BingOn allowance for this. If they lose in court, you will still need to pay for this and for videos.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I know. But my point is why should I penalized as a "remote desktop user", when a "video user" is not?

<comment><USER7> You're not being penalized. You're simply not being granted an advantage of zero rated traffic because you're using network traffic (an encrypted remote desktop session) that can't be managed in the same way video traffic can be.

Not all bits are created equally.

<comment><USER2> _You 're not being penalized. You're simply not being granted an advantage_

But is there a meaningful difference there?

 _Not all bits are created equally._

That notion is literally the core of the Net Neutrality debate.

\---

EDIT: I replied to another post which someone deleted before I could submit. So an elaboration on my point above:

At the end of the day, it's all marketing.

Remote desktop being the "standard rate" and Video being free isn't meaningfully different from Video being the "standard rate" and remote desktop being "standard rate * 1.5". It's just how it's being sold to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The fundamental problem here is lack of real competition. If the transport market was not dominated by just a few players, it would not be necessary to use regulation to try and enforce someone's definition of net neutrality. What I want to see is the gov't step in and break up the providers and maintain the last mile network as a public utility. Wireless isn't exactly the same as a wired network, obviously, but wireless bandwidth isn't unlimited either.

</comment><comment><USER9> Real question: does the fact that you can disable it ameliorate the situation at all? They are not forcing their customers out of freedom. I always assumed there would be customized services that sacrificed freedom for cost—so long as it is not the only feasible option, I don't see a problem here.

<comment><USER10> Net Neutrality was never about __just __the customers / consumers. The argument has been made fairly frequently saying Net Neutrality is good for consumers (and it is, in the long run), but it is much more than that.

It also allows small companies to compete freely instead of favoring large incumbent companies. Imagine a world in which Hulu came out first and was zero rated but Netflix was just trying to gain customers. Which service do you think the consumers would be using ?

This is exactly what is happening now, except Netflix, spotify and other services are the large incumbents. Anything new is being penalized because they don't have the customers or voice.

<comment><USER9> > Anything new is being penalized because they don't have the customers or > voice.

This is only on the burst option, though. This is just as much in the consumer's hands as it is the business's. This is precisely why I disabled it—I don't want to have to consider a brand's political standing with T-Mobile to figure out what kind of service I get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> t-mobile does the same with spotify in germany. really bad for competing services.

<comment><USER7> Competing services can apply to be included in the program based on technical specifications (limit your bitrate, clearly identify the traffic as video).

<comment><USER12> Sure, in theory, but in practice we're seeing big companies like Amazon Music, Google Play Videos, Youtube not being able to move on just T-Mobile.

Complexity also increases as each ISP gets to choose their own rules.

Besides, I, as a consumer want to be able to use Amazon Prime Music / Video at 0, whether Amazon wants to take the time to set it up or not.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately, as a consumer, you don't have the technical resources to integrate your video provider with T-Mobile for them to support BingeOn. Your options are to wait, or move to another cellular provider (which doesn't, of course, have BingeOn).

That is why BingeOn is offered. T-Mobile receives a network efficiency benefit, which they pass along to their users as unlimited video. Just because the user complains they want something, doesn't mean they get it.

As always, the customer is not always right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's free shipping. I know people don't like to hear this. The market for mobile "shippers" is more competitive than that in the physical world, in fact.

The analogy is not perfect, but if one objects to this then one objects to Amazon or vendors offering free shipping, which is a benefit that puts them ahead of competitors, and (might) lead the consumer to include it in their decision-making.

This also shows the tension between neutrality advocacy and consumer benefit. In a PR sense, it's very hard to win, when most consumers only see the benefit. (I happen to side with consumers on this.)

<comment><USER14> Imagine if only Fedex got to decide who got free shipping?

<comment><USER15> Fedex probably does charge different prices to different shippers.

Which I think for the purposes of the comparison you are making is the same thing (that is, Fedex _does_ make exclusive deals that are advantageous to Fedex).

<comment><USER14> Different prices, sure. Free shipping, not so much.

<comment><USER15> Doesn't the exclusivity matter more than the free?

<comment><USER14> No. If Fedex won't deal with you then you can always go to UPS.

Free is the kingmaker. If Fedex is free, you will do whatever it takes to get on their "good boy" list. You cannot afford to pay for shipping if your competitors are getting it for free.

<comment><USER15> _will do whatever it takes to get on their "good boy" list_

That isn't true. If Fedex charges good boys $0 and everyone else $10, everyone else will only bother with the good boy list if it will save them the $10 per item.

<comment><USER14> You kind of made my point there. This pricing structure will deter anybody from competing in the market that cannot absorb the cost of making it onto the good boy list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I appreciate that the paper does discuss AT&T, Verizon and Comcast also offering zero rating but only in the case that content is provided by AT&T, Verizon or Comcast.

</comment><comment><USER17> Down vote all you want, but let's be honest. We here are nerds. We know the fundamentals of how the Internet works.

And cost occurs somewhere. This ain't all for free. There are electricity bills to pay, bandwidth with 3rd parties to pay for, and blades to physically source.

Video on demand is damn resource intensive. This isn't about delivering bytes which UTF-16 decoded speak about about a government. This isn't about delivering bytes which primarily educate. this is about Netflix n' Chill. It's about watching Modern Family on the commute home, and consumers loving it.

A lot of the cost for this love, especially in mobile, is paid for by the ISPs. They have to physically deliver this traffic to your device via nodes for $19.99 a month. And damn them if a loading spinner appears. "My Internets rubbish...I'm gonna switch to Acme Internet...they have free Netflix streaming."

So let's not lose focus: all software we write is for the end consumer...we need to create great, appreciated experiences for our users, otherwise they just unsubscribe.

T-Mobile is doing just that. This isn't a philisophical debate. It's about providing end users what they want. And they want Netflix on their mobile without costing them more. And lambasting T-Mobile for doing such is missing the entire constitution of the Internet.

Let them eat cake!

<comment><USER18> No, it's about me being able to get the content of my choice at the same rate as the big boys. If I want to watch a programming live stream (I'm not much for modern family.), I should be able to do it at the same cost as any other bits over the air. Here, producers that that pay T-mobile will have an advantage. In ten years, we'll be boxed back into the same tired old content like we are with cable television. No thanks.

<comment><USER19> And if you opt out of BingeOn, you have exactly that.

<comment><USER18> Except they'll make it cost prohibitive to stream anything but those that pay the fee to T-Moble by artificially increasing the price for data.

<comment><USER19> That seems to me like _that_ would be the time to be outraged.

As near as I can tell, this seems like the #3 or 4 mobile carrier looking for a reason to make themselves appear better to a market segment than the #1 or #2 carriers. Jacking up prices seems antithetical to that mission.

I understand what people want out of net neutrality and all that, but I personally think that the outrage should be saved for things that are outrageous. Giving things away for free, even if there are ulterior motives attached, doesn't seem to rise to that level, in my opinion.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Textingway – Create and post to a blog with one text message - <AUTHOR> http://textingway.com <comment><USER2> Interesting concept. Do you have an example blog? I would suggest linking to one from your landing page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will do.

[http://textingway.com/BDMEM2S](http://textingway.com/BDMEM2S)

<comment><USER2> I'm having deja vu. Isn't this how Twitter began, thus the need for character limits?

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, yep.

Textingway - Twitter 2007

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very, very interesting.

Shameless plug: since you're not allowing your users to modify and style their blogs' HTML you could make use of the concept of classless templates: [http://websitesfortrello.github.io/classless/](http://websitesfortrello.github.io/classless/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, I'll take a look.

This might sound silly, but what do you think is interesting about it? We FEEL like it's good for something but we're trying to discover what that is. Don't tell PG I said that...

<comment><USER3> Well, I don't know. Sometimes I came up with something on my mind I would like to "post somewhere". I don't use Twitter, so Textingway could be my solution.

However, since I'm not in the US I'll not use it. Also, besides having these thoughts every day, a little later I remember that I quit Facebook because it forced me to write things I wasn't sure I wanted to write, then I decide I'm not going to post anything. I'm a peculiar case, probably.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Shameless/shameful plug, we were (a bust) on PH today [https://www.producthunt.com/tech/textingway](https://www.producthunt.com/tech/textingway)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, now it's goin pretty good!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was thinking earlier today that I'd probably use twitter if it was text based like it used to be.

You should definitely put some example/feature threads on your website.

<comment><USER4> oh i see the blog link...</comment></comment>


Price Cost Twitter Cash but Gave It Credibility - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/did-twitter-leave-money-on-the-table/?nl=business&emc=edit_dlbkpm_20131108&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Maybe I'm fundamentally missing something, but I have a very hard time seeing why Twitter should care all that much about how much their stock 'pops' at open. Sure, they should care deeply about the price it settles at, because that's how they'll attract talent in the future and bases how they'll price future offerings, but the actual amount of pop itself? I don't see it.

This gem from the article:

 _> Should a stock offering maximize value for the companies selling shares, for the investors looking to gobble those shares up or for early employees and funders? And why are investors buying the shares — because they love the company's fundamentals or because they sense a good deal?_

This is a ridiculously false dichotomy. In any efficient market, sellers are trying to raise the price as far as the demand will bear, and buyers should be willing to purchase up to their estimated value of the company, taking into account their risk tolerance. Price should be a tug-of-war between these actors.

The way I see it, there's only two possibilities:

1) Pre-IPO Twitter thought there was a realistic risk of not fully selling the shares they put up if they raised the price.

2) Twitter purposefully got less money in a fair market trade than they could have.

And (2) seems totally insane to me for a rational actor. (1) seems plausible; apparently these things are hard to price.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand what you're asking. The IPOing company cares about the pop because if it is big, it means they could have gone at a higher price and pocketed more cash. The "optimal" pop is probably around 10-30% given that pricing is difficult and you want to make sure there's a bit of a rise.

Auctions sound good in theory but don't work very well (see Google). You generally want some banks selling the crud out of the offering and committing to the company.

<comment><USER2> But that's a counterfactual. Once the pop occurs, the company _could not_ have gone with a higher price and pocketed more cash. A rational actor should make the best decision they can make given the information they have at the time, place their bets, and take their chances. The article clearly made it seem like having a pop (as differentiated from having a higher stock price) was a favor that Twitter was doing investors, and that somehow this favor would be repaid by market at large via some mechanism that's totally mysterious to me. I'm honestly really baffled that this meme gets repeated so much, and I'm open to explanations.

Dutch auctions _do_ sound good in theory, and I'm aware of what happened with Google's: a 17% pop, which left some money on the table, but much less than Twitter did. Google's stock did abnormally well in the months following, but it's hard for me to divine how much of this had to do with the IPO mechanism. In any case, I think a sample size of one is probably not enough to draw much of a conclusion one way or the other.

<comment><USER3> I still don't really understand what you are wondering. If we're talking about post-pricing, then, yes, Twitter can't make more money (actually it can because of the over-allotment which of course would only get exercised if the price goes up; another reason to hope for upward movement).

Twitter was clearly playing the whole thing conservatively and aagreed to a price that was probably low (hindsight to some, foresight to most).

There's some incentive so appease the banks as they historically do play a meaningful role going forward as related to M&A and fundraising.

The Google IPO was lousy not because it only popped 18% but because the auction format severely depressed the whole thing. Google inexplicably got pretty much the same result as Twitter ($1,8b on a $23b valuation) despite being an order of magnitude more impressive (I like Twitter).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So according to the Times entrepreneurs should spend years building companies and VCs hundreds of millions funding them so that when (and if) they've built a successful company that can be IPO'd they can take 5% of the total market cap of the company and give it to some Wall Street insiders to get some "credibility".

Bankers are same folks that argue that they are adding efficiency to the market and thus deserve a big paycheck, and yet their IPO pricing maxim seems to be "guess a number and just make sure it's below the actual value so you don't anger the market". When Facebook tries to price it right (using the greenshoe to adjust) or when Google tries to do a reverse auction they get up in arms. Does anyone actually have a good argument for leaving in a margin for the investors in the IPO? This article's only attempt seems to be this:

"But it is also in Twitter's long-term interest to remain in the good graces of institutional investors that believe in the company and will continue to invest. After all, based on fundamentals alone, it was hard enough to justify valuing Twitter at $18.3 billion, based on $26 a share, let alone $31.8 billion, based on $45.10."

This to me reads like "they need to bribe the market so they'll keep putting money in Twitter".

<comment><USER5> In simpler terms, it's the price of admission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Epicurean Dealmaker wrote a fantastic post a while back, and I will endorse but not repeat his entirely correct explanation of why IPOs are supposed to price at a discount; just go read it.

[http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2013/09/go-ask- alice....](http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2013/09/go-ask-alice.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> >Twitter and its banker, Goldman Sachs, widely miscalculated demand for the stock

>Those who were able to secure an allocation of shares recognized an instant 73 percent gain

Doesn't sound like miscalculation.

I am confused why this seems to happen, though. I'd have to assume that the people at Twitter have access to more information and advice than I could possibly hope to understand. Even so, they choose to not use an auction or anything, but let GS make a huge amount for themselves and choice customers. There must be some reason these companies' allow their IPOs to be managed that way.

I also do not quite understand how "winning the good graces of the market" means anything. Unless they're suggesting that Twitter is planning on tens of millions of more shares in the future, and hoping a good IPO leads to even higher "long term" share price.

In the case of FB: If FB stock had stayed at $20 or so, would that really affect FB? It'd be less than fantastic for employees and other shareholders that had options or shares, but would it hurt FB the company itself?

<comment><USER8> Investment bankers' job is to allocate tens of millions of shares. Individual investors trade in small 100-1,000 share lots.

Having an individual trade close at $50.09 doesn't mean you'll be able to move tens of millions of shares at $50.09.

<comment><USER2> But it sort of does imply that. Here's the reasoning -- There's a liquid market of a lot of shares trading hands at $40+. Anybody who bought a share at $26 knows he or she can sell today for $40+. To a first approximation, choosing not to sell at $40 has roughly the same effect as choosing to buy at $40. If the price is supported at $40+, that's at least very suggestive evidence that enough buyers could have been found at that price in the first place.

<comment><USER8> That $40 floor exists once the market starts trading and there's external confirmation and safety in numbers.

The IPO process is more or less bankers emailing clients asking "Hey, want to buy this brand new company at $26? How about $32?" You essentially have to make a decision without information on how other buyers behave, which forces conservative behavior.

<comment><USER2> Yea, I get it. I'm just saying it's suggestive, not conclusive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, what does people here think about Twitter's valuation? Aren't they basically a 22 billion dollar advertising company? I am agnostic in this regard (although perhaps a little skeptical), but I was wondering what others think.

<comment><USER10> Google is a 350 billion dollar advertising company...

<comment><USER9> Yes, but then again Google is the world's biggest Internet advertising company. So I don't think that's the most apt comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't get these articles. Using Facebook as an example is terrible! Just because Facebook didn't go up on its first day as much as twitter did doesn't mean they left money on the table.

Twitter IPOd at a much much higher price than those traded on private markets before the IPO. Facebook on the other hand went to almost the same price as on private markets. [1]

<comment><USER6> This article [1] says that Twitter shares traded as high as $32/share on private markets prior to the IPO.

[1] [http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/real-money-with- ali...](http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/real-money-with- alivelshi/Real-Money-Blog/2013/11/6/twitter-set-to- gopublicthursdayyetsharesarealreadytrading.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As Twitter is becoming more popular a Twitter handle is becoming increasingly more like a phone number or email address and just like a phone number or and email address I wouldn't want it to be tied into one particular provider.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is an interesting theory. I'm not sure I understand it fully. But since the company pared back its offer (and likely will sell again via 2nd offering) it certainly is good to leave the impression that some 'value' will be left on the table for public shareholders. Whether or not its all a mind and pr game, versus something more actually tangible, is perhaps beside the point. And I suppose that is what the title is meant to convey. Here is one critical bit of context:

 _But no Twitter insiders sold stock as part of the offering, so their shares, valued at as little as $17 just a week ago, are now worth more than $40 a share. With the shares still at least 60 percent above the initial offering price, Twitter's insiders must feel rather pleased with how the offering was executed._</comment>