On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature (1896) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf <comment><USER2> I'm not a climate-change denier, far from it, but it is worth noting that Svante Arrhenius made conclusions based on assumptions which are seriously flawed [1] [2]. The effects he described are at least four times exaggerated when compared with modern measurements.

[1] [http://members.casema.nl/errenwijlens/co2/arrhrev.htm](http://members.casema.nl/errenwijlens/co2/arrhrev.htm) [2] [http://members.casema.nl/errenwijlens/co2/arrhenius.html](http://members.casema.nl/errenwijlens/co2/arrhenius.html)

<comment><USER3> Nearly 150 year old science is not accurate and has been replaced by modern theories, observations and measurements is surprising because...?

<comment><USER2> Very surprising! Look at the accuracy of the measurements of speed of light [1]. Even Eratosthenes (2nd century BC) approximations on the distance to and diameter of the sun is more accurate. The accuracy of scientific measurements at the time was in the order of parts per thousand. He took some lucky guesses, combined it with the science known at the time and presented it as new facts.

[1] [http://www.speed- light.info/measure/speed_of_light_history.h...](http://www.speed- light.info/measure/speed_of_light_history.htm)

<comment><USER4> Isn't that just the survivorship bias of "interestingly close" predictions? How many _other_ predictions for the speed of light from 2000+ years ago do we still know about?

<comment><USER2> That's proving my point: the CO2 measurements were 400% besides the mark and shouldn't be categorised as scientific given the time-period. My comment tries to place Arrhenius into perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >'Langley himself in a later memoir showed that the full moon, which certainly does not possess any sensible heat-absorbing atmosphere, has a "mean effective temperature" of about 45 C.'

This seems to be incorrect. The mean temperature of the moon is somewhere between 104-215K:

>'The mean temperature at the equator is 215.5 K with an average maximum of 392.3 K and average minimum of 94.3 K ( Fig. 19 ), representing an average change in temperature of ∼300 K. Average maximum and minimum temperatures in the polar regions (poleward of 85 °) are 202 K and 50 K respectively with a mean average temperature 104 K.' [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103516...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103516304869)

<comment><USER6> I believe he was attempting to find the temperature of the sunlit moon, so was actually much too low.

If you're interested, there's some discussion of it here: [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1638754](http://www.jstor.org/stable/1638754)

<comment><USER5> Whats the headline number in that article? Btw, I get ~310-320K average for the dayside, depending on albedo, etc assumptions. So 273 + 45 = 318 K is pretty close.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a pretty good one from 40 years earlier. [https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6xhFAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA382#v=...](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6xhFAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA382#v=onepage&q&f=false)

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if the technology to convert sugar to ethanol exists in the 1960s, which would probably involve yeast. Even turning it to charcoal using sulfuric acid would be better. (background: [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar- in...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry- shifted-blame-to-fat.html))

<comment><USER2> This is a non-sequitur.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there anything about the Influence of Carbonic Acid and Temperature Upon Vegetation?

<comment><USER10> Yes, it may increase it, but only it there is also enough water and nitrogene and it doesn't get too warm, which is not the case in many situations:

[http://news.stanford.edu/pr/02/jasperplots124.html](http://news.stanford.edu/pr/02/jasperplots124.html)

<comment><USER11> Not 'may' but 'does'. CO2 provides an important source of carbon for plant growth. Commercial growers have used carbon dioxide to enhance greenhouse production for many years. The effect is now continental due to the increase in atomospheric CO2.

See "Human-induced greening of the northern extratropical land surface" Nature Climate Change 6, 959–963 (2016)

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268280922_Ground_an...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268280922_Ground_and_satellite_based_evidence_of_the_biophysical_mechanisms_behind_the_greening_Sahel)

<comment><USER12> It is not "does" but "may" since, as gp wrote, it "does not" when certain conditions are not met.

<comment><USER11> Apologies - my mistake! It's true that (not here!) in the rush to talk about its warming effect, many choose to ignore the positive effect of CO2 in the atmosphere <with respect> to its importance as a carbon source for plants.

Greening has of course taken place. To quote NASA, [ I think I've got this one right ] ...

"From a quarter to half of Earth's vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25. An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries led the effort, which involved using satellite data from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments to help determine the leaf area index, or amount of leaf cover, over the planet's vegetated regions. The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States."

[https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide- fer...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide- fertilization-greening-earth)

This is not in the least surprising given extensive experimentation showing enhanced profitable growth for many plants (not all) with increased CO2. There will be upper limits of course.

<comment><USER13> >in the rush to talk about its warming effect, many choose to ignore the positive effect of CO2 in the atmosphere <with respect> to its importance as a carbon source for plants.

I'm not sure if you're meaning to, but your diction comes across as extremely biased. "Rush to talk" imputes a a hurriedness that does not seem justified based on any discussion I've seen. Also, a "choice" to "ignore" a particular effect, imputes a conscious decision to omit something that may be important. This uncharitable framing seems to be in error, as your own link doesn't seem very optimistic about greening countering climate change.

>"Studies have shown that plants acclimatize, or adjust, to rising carbon dioxide concentration and the fertilization effect diminishes over time.

The actual paper is quite interesting!

[http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v6/n8/full/nclimate30...](http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v6/n8/full/nclimate3004.html)

And it's very important to study, but I don't understand the need to impute bad motives to others not involved in the HN discussion.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


TC: Apple "Surprise" This Fall Likely An "iPad 3″ - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/09/ipad-3/ <comment><USER2> In other news, Techcrunch has "well-researched" "journalism" written by "reporters".

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's more likely to be their rumored gaming platform:

[http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/10/hints_of_apple...](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/10/hints_of_apple_tv_gaming_platform_found_in_ios_4_3_beta.html) .

</comment><comment><USER4> good, because we're bored fantasizing about how great the iPad 2 will be.</comment>


Adobe's Digital Publishing mistake - <AUTHOR> http://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/adobes-digital-publishing-mistake/

<comment><USER2> This seems like a perfect opportunity for someone to come in and undercut them.

The app-generation part is easy and the subscription part is reasonably easy. The tricky part is figuring out what an effective magazine layout looks like on a tablet (which I don't think anyone has nailed yet) and figuring out how to make it accessible for authoring by "print people" (which is where Adobe might well have the upper hand).</comment>


Our World in Data Is at Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> https://ourworldindata.org/owid-at-ycombinator <comment><USER2> Recently discovered this website through Patrick Collison's blog. A goldmine of interesting data/analysis.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm wondering if they'll provide APIs to query the data, sooner or later</comment>


How Did WeWork's Adam Neumann Build a $47B Company? - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/wework-adam-neumann.html <comment><USER2> I'll just go on the record to say that I think WeWork is the biggest deck of cards that is begging for a collapse. I've only been to a handful of locations, but they never seem busy and I'm not sure how they're making rent.

Plus, not to mention, back in my day, when you did a startup and got funding from your rich uncle (not Uncle Rich), you grew your startup from your apartment, and when you outgrew that space, you got a bigger apartment. (ala Silicon Valley style)

I dunno, I can't put my finger on it, but I think this whole thing is a massive game of charades...

<comment><USER3> The ones I saw were very busy, and, filled by large corporates that wanted to be hip. I think for them value proposition is that they are able to hire some hipster people who don't want to work in the old buildings and also build some marketing stories around their "labs".

That said, I "worked" in a WeWork for about 6 months and it was just terrible. Tiny offices, lots of visual distractions, lots of noise, many parties. I wouldn't ever do it again.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it's a matter of wanting to "be hip", but a case of recruiting being a huge problem for most companies. Renting out the 'cool' co-working spaces of WeWork probably isn't their long term goal.

If BigCo has exhausted the talent in their city they have three options left: employ remote workers, pay people to relocate, or open satellite offices and pay a little more than then the local businesses to get people. WeWork is enabling the last option at scale. Renting managed office is a viable business model that's been happening for decades.

Whether there's enough of a market to make WeWork work is another question, but there might be. Anecdotally, a large insurer recently opened a new office in my city here in the UK because they've had _40_ open positions in their London office for years. They've already filled half those positions. They wouldn't have done that without renting a large office on a business park.

<comment><USER5> I don't understand why BigCo would ever go with the last option after talent exhaustion. The former two make way more sense.

<comment><USER4> A big company that's resisted remote working will find it hard to integrate remote people in to their teams. Remote is great, but unless _everyone_ is in favor of it it can fail horribly - a manager who insists on having oversight of what people are doing at any given moment will kill any chance of remote workers being productive. Consequently if you have a big team at 'head office' who aren't used to or good at managing remote people then remote won't work.

Paying people to relocate from a small city to the most expensive place in the country is exceptionally difficult and expensive. Many developers here in the UK see London as a really bad place to live unless you're paid more than £100,000. Developer wages in London are often _not_ £100,000.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My WeWork has three kinds of clients. The first kind sit in the dedicated desk area, work 10-12 hours/day and rarely leave the space for community events. They're either serious consultants/freelancers or just starting their own startups.

The second kind sit in the shared desk area and basically dick around all day. They attend all the community events and use WeWork as mostly a networking/dating hub. Who they network with, I have no clue.

The third kind are companies with satellite offices in WeWork. GoDaddy works out of my space and has taken over an entire floor. Curiously, these are now the largest client type by far. Three floors in my space were earlier dedicated to independent workers and small startups.

But now, WeWork opened three more floors of space, and of the six floors, four are occupied entirely by large companies.

<comment><USER7> It's interesting that godaddy would opt for a wework rather than leasing office space and setting it up. Probably less cost and hassle?

<comment><USER8> My naive view is that it's similar to the reason some companies use AWS rather than running their own data center. That is, it's worth it to pay the premium to not have to manage their own space, and have the flexibility to scale up/down their usage a bit more quickly than locking into multi-year leases.

<comment> xkcd-sucks Real estate is a real pain in the ass for small startups; it eats up like several man-months of companies that have no people dedicated to stuff like this. I do think wework is bullshit, but thinking back to the process of moving a company your point makes sense. And in earlyish-stave companies the CEO / bigwigs are most involved with moving and corporations' decisions are no more economically rational than those of the people in charge.

<comment><USER9> WeWork is better than opening a satellite office in pretty much the same way that renting a hotel room is better than buying a house in a location that you're visiting. Once you've proven you have traction and it's going to be sustained, it makes sense to transition to your own real estate (owned or leased), but in the early days, it's better to wildly "overpay" for temporary, flexible, easy space.

<comment><USER6> WeWork, at least in my area, has also picked office spaces right next to metro stations. This real estate is hard to find and several of the companies working out of WeWork advertise how they're located right next to the metro exit.

I'm just saying that this entire community feels very bearish on WeWork, but there is some method to their madness

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was a member at WeWork for over a year. The company doesn't have a direction. WeWork seems more like a hip place to look cool than get stuff done.

A few experiences I've had:

1\. WeWork holds lots of events like "Dog of the Month." Meanwhile, there are empty desks everywhere and the printer doesn't work.

2\. I cancelled and no one ever followed up to ask why or try to keep me as a customer (see above).

3\. The spaces are always too loud and chaotic. Every attempt is made to maximize rentable space that is never rented. American Airlines offers more bathrooms per passenger than WeWork has for its tenants.

4\. I was able to cancel to $550 / month dedicated desk membership and get a year of hot desk membership for FREE thanks to a new promotion with American Express. AMEX snd WeWork should not have opened this generous deal to existing WeWork customers. This is very poor revenue management and shows the shortsighted approach the company has toward growth.

</comment><comment><USER11> By taking an old stodgy business (commercial real estate) and bringing it in conformance with modern expectations of design, ease of transactions, lease length, and vibe.

The real estate owners couldn't be bothered to do this because they make too much money by doing nothing to bother with doing something for an extra $47b (a rounding error on the value of global commercial real estate)

The huge fundraising rounds are an important part of this because the hype is important for making it seem like a cool place which is essential to the economics.

Add in some founder god complex which is not really necessary or sufficient for a successful startup but does seem to be often present.

<comment><USER6> So many of these unicorns seem so stupidly simple in hindsight.

I'm in St Petersburg right now and the taxi outside the train station quoted an initial rate of EUR 50 to drive a grand total of 6km (after haggling, "just" EUR 30).

I booked an Uber (operated under Yandex Taxi in Russia now) and the total price was just EUR 5

Take stodgy, often scammy, and downright consumer unfriendly industries, add transparency and accessibility to them, and viola - you have a unicorn.

<comment><USER12> > So many of these unicorns seem so stupidly simple in hindsight.

The "stupidly" part comes in when you realize that maybe the cabbie had a better grasp of the economics of his business when he accepted your bid of 30 EUR. The gig economy people driving you for a fraction of the 5 EUR you paid might come to the same conclusion sooner or later.

<comment><USER13> Even worse Uber might have paid the cabbie another €5 to take the job.

<comment><USER14> $10 is still less than $30

<comment><USER15> Add the taxes, add the commercial insurances (how many Uber has one?), add the much higher maintenance for a car that runs all day every day,...

Just because those drivers don't factor in things in legal or financial hindsight doesn't mean they won't need it, or that it won't go seriously wrong when that need gets called on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Short Answer: he is riding the Gig economy just like Uber etc.

Most viable businesses with a steady revenue stream can afford to rent office space and furnish it on their own. But the self employed folks -- the web designeers, SEM experts, and various other professionals without a steady employer need a place to work. For some, working from home is not an option due to regulation or family consideration etc. For most, working from a coffee shop is a very bad idea for various reason including ergonomics. WeWork fills this niche. Is this a $47B niche ? very unlikely .

<comment><USER17> I'm not a believer in WW's business model, but this is an overly-cynical take. We're a company that "started" in WeWork, have our own office now, and in fact moved a different office of ours from a private space in Long Island to a WeWork in Manhattan.

What WeWork offers to small businesses is quite valuable: an instantly- obtainable month-to-month lease, at relatively reasonable rates, with all standard office amenities (most notably Internet access) included. You can decide you need an office for your business on a Monday and have a better office on Tuesday than most of your local peers. Even better, you can quickly scale that office up to completely private offices or down to shared space.

To put it gently, the jury is still out on whether WeWork is charging an amount, given its number of subscribers at each level of service, to make the company profitable. It seems totally fair to predict that it'll turn out to be a house of cards.

It does not, on the other hand, seem fair to suggest that WeWork isn't offering something that people want.

<comment><USER18> It's much easier to offer people something they want if you are undercutting your competition by subsidizing your business with dumb investor money.

<comment><USER17> I guess that is a shorter way of saying the exact same thing I just said, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The biggest revenue opportunity for WeWork is big corporations opening smaller office location in cities where just want to staff a small field office or operations office. Example, Uber opening an office in let's say Columbus. Now instead of Uber going on a real estate hunt, they can simply rent out space in WeWork Columbus which gives them flexibility to scale or shrink depending on business. It is essentially abstracting away the real estate inefficiencies. There is a definitely a market for it. But not sure whether it is worth $47bn

<comment><USER20> This probably true, and there's a company similar to WW in Montreal who did a presentation indicating that as well.

The thing is: there's very little competitive advantage in that.

Having 'cool decor' is less valuable to larger companies, and it's not as though other entities can't duplicate that if they want.

Other, more established firms can inch their way into copying some of WW's mojo, and compete on price, which the CFO's of said companies will appreciate.

<comment><USER21> I wouldn't say cool decor isn't valuable to larger companies. If you're a stodgy, older firm you're going to get some chunk of Millennials that will decide that your beige cubicle farm isn't anywhere they want to work. Or you might be running investors through the office and they don't know jack about tech but if you don't have a bunch of kids in hoodies clustered around the kombucha dispenser then they might just pass.

<comment><USER20> It's not that hard to fake up a bit of 'cool decor'.

Landlords will do it quickly and cheaply if it's part of a contract.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have the next billion-dollar business idea, an " Airbnb for coworking spaces". Convert your existing house to a co-working space. Looked at Wework, already pay too much for rent in the Bay area. I work from home, and would not mind the company. Got good coffee and great beer as well!

<comment><USER22> This suggestion is made every time there's a thread about WeWork and it's just not viable. There are startups in this space already and the reality is always borne out: it's simply not worthwhile to rent out space in your home to an individual. You can get a monthly membership to WeWork for <$400 in most locations, and there's lots of no-brand co-working spaces that charge less than half of that. If you can pay $200/month to have 24/7 access to a space with amenities and flexibility... why would you pay someone $10 to sit in their apartment for 7 hours until they come home and you awkwardly shuffle out so they can make their dinner? And who is going to rent their apartment out for $10/day with all the liability that comes along with it? All the pain of Airbnb, <10% of the earnings.

Every one of the startups in this space either disappears, or pivots their focus to larger spaces designed for meetings, events or shoots. For example there's [https://breather.com](https://breather.com) in the US and [https://www.vrumi.com](https://www.vrumi.com) in the UK. The cheapest space on vrumi is far more expensive than WeWork.

<comment><USER23> To be fair the number of people who are able and willing to pay even $200/mo for co-working space is MUCH smaller than the number of people who are able and willing to pay $10/mo. Plenty of people would prefer to pay $10 to sit in someone's apartment for 7 hours, just like every day millions of people pay $5 to sit in a cafe for a couple hours.

This becomes more obvious when you leave the rich tech bubble of SF.

<comment><USER22> I'm not clear on the numbers you're thinking about: is that $10 per month or $10 per day? The former is impossible (that's... 1/300th of what Airbnb-ing would earn) and the latter is equivalent to the cost of a formal co-working space.

As the existing startups have proven, there's no market for individuals renting houses to work from, the economics don't work. A day pass at WeWork is cheaper than every listing on Vrumi.

<comment><USER7> I looked at Vrumi and the cost is ridiculous! $20/day/person tops, I go to Hacker Dojo in the Bay area and it's a decent place with good wifi, nothing fancy and its about that much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hm, I worked in a company that had hired ~140 desks in WeWork (Aldgate London). If all the floors in the world have a few large-companies provisioned and filled like that - I _could_. be convinced the valuation is plausible.

When you are a large company in WeWork, you set the culture (e.g. noise) and you have personal relationships with the WeWork staff - which makes things run smoother.

From reading the comments it seems many people have had lack-luster experiences. Especially those who hired a single desk and have been forced to interact with the community. And imho the community is pretty unique:

I remember knocking off work at 7pm, and hearing there was free beers. I wandered over in a work-daze. As I approached the door, it opened and out poured hi-energy EDM, accompanied by a large group of happy, shout-chatting drunks. I slid around them and entered what was more "club at 1am" \- rather than "knock-off drinks". I mean there was flashing lights, a DJ, and a decent sound system. What I was most amazed by was passing multiple people who seemed to be rolling hard. It was definitely impressive, but after coding for 10 hours straight it was not what I needed, so I grabbed a fist of and Heineken backed out.

The thing that always stuck with me, was the implicit agreement by all- attending, that they were all going to go _hard_ as soon as they knocked off work. I provide no judgement, just an account of something I'd never seen in inter-office culture. Note: I never personally saw that level of revelry again.

</comment><comment><USER25> Ah, the magic of financial engineering. Mr. Neumann will cash out of his fictional decacorn in dribs and drabs and never have to work again. Everyone else will be left with a bit pile of shit (aka a commercial real estate venture that bet on ever upward growth and got ripped to shreds in the secular downturn).

<comment><USER26> It's not like they were working hard to make the world a better place, but investing in the hopes that they would be richer without too much work. It's hard to feel sorry for them. They are on the same level as Neumann but he happened to be cannier.

<comment><USER27> The laught is on us when pension founds buy at the IPO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> He made investors believe in a non-sensical vision that is not rooted in any sort of financial or commercial reality in the middle of an insane bull market.

Simple.

<comment><USER29> You got it slightly wrong: He made investors believe that there will be bigger more stupid investors that will eventually buy out the shares for a higher price than those investors.

(Also, see Uber, Lyft and other ponzy scheme based companies)

<comment><USER30> Maybe! That's what happened. Is it his initial plan? Unclear. Results don't proof intentions or even competence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > He has bragged about working 20-hour days and regularly called executive > meetings that would begin after midnight. "I've had meetings that started at > 2 a.m. where he joined us 45 minutes late, but that meeting was worth > millions," a former WeWork executive told me.

This is not OK.

</comment><comment><USER32> So i work out of a competitors place here in south east asia (indonesia to be specific), for the guys here from the region they probably know who im talking about. This coworking space was initially funded by a local VC but then low and behold softbank just invested, wework is also here in indonesia. I (last year) had to downsize my startup because some areas of business didnt do so well so i moved into this coworking, decent building , upper class part of town and i have 4 rooms next to each other probably 5x3 meters each. Each room i pay 300$usd a month, got it at a 60% discount cause it was just opening and locked it in for 3 years ! But at say ~$700 a room per month full price its still a dam good price, cheaper than anywhere else by far in the area. Wework is charging 3x that amount ... i have no idea what SB's strategy is here with wework and this locally invested competitor, specially with regards to cannibalizing each other and specially in a price sensitive market, maybe things will go the way of uber and grab where the bigger more international son of softbank will leave the region so the local son can dominate. But honestly, other then cheap rent, there is nothing special about these places, i dont see any tech, auto bookings, elastic rental or anything, i came here cause i had to downsize , needed interent , place for my guys to work, strategize and refocus. Its helped us save on costs over the last year and have brought back the startup from near collapse to doing very well again. Also at the price im getting it i have no idea how they make money, even at the full price its hard to understand as i know what a floor in the place im working at actually costs ... there are also many empty rooms ... i mean its like uber to me, im using it cause its cheap and its convenient, but should a cheaper one come out in the near future, ill simply ask my guys to pickup their laptops and move next door, there is really no added value for me to use one or the other just like all the ride hailing companies ... whos cheaper will get my business, if this is the way these SB companies are going to roll over the next few years and there really is no added value, they in for a lot of hurt. But after saying that, i thank them for cheap rent and helping me get my startup back on track :)

<comment><USER33> Friendly suggestion: adding some line breaks / paragraphs to a post this long will make people much more likely to read it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Valuation inflation / delusion only really matters if you're the last one left holding the bag. So long as there's someone else willing to buy the game continues for another round.

When the music stops though things get real ugly real quick.

<comment><USER35> _Valuation inflation / delusion only really matters if you're the last one left holding the bag_

Not if you're positioned as too-big-to-fail [1] and can force a government bailout.

[1] [https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/wework- strategy-t...](https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/wework-strategy- teardown/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> For me WeWork is a prime example of how the rich (investors) don't know what to do with their piles of cash. We need to force (eh, inspire) them to invest in renewables instead.

</comment><comment><USER37> It seems like these companies are fully over valued so now they need to come up with shit to push down people's throats for the IPOs so the investors can get out at a profit.

This is what happens when VCs keep funding these loses for a decade. We saw the same thing with Uber, pushing Uber eats as if it's going to take over all food, meanwhile there has been like 3-5 startups already doing that at a very easy to value valuation.

Anyway, I'm not buying.

Edit: I'm referencing the following from the article

>>"He is known for making bombastic pronouncements, like this one at an all- company event last year: "There are 150 million orphans in the world. We want to solve this problem and give them a new family: the WeWork family." In L.A., Neumann told his employees that the newly formed We Company would now have three prongs — WeWork, WeLive, and WeGrow — with a single, grandiose mission: "to elevate the world's consciousness.""

</comment><comment><USER35> The CBINSIGHTS research report (WeWork strategy teardown) is an interesting read...

"WeWork's $47 Billion Dream: The Lavishly Funded Startup That Could Disrupt Commercial Real Estate"

[https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/wework- strategy-t...](https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/wework-strategy- teardown/)

</comment><comment><USER38> It's a bubble and everyone there is afraid of saying.

</comment><comment><USER12> For all the criticism that modern media gets regarding journalistic standards around coverage of big business, it's remarkable that they will lead with eye- popping valuation numbers in their headlines when they know that they are more or less a fiction concocted by VCs.

</comment><comment><USER39> I worked in a WeWork in London for 6 month (it was one of the main reason I left.) I don't even considering initial interview with anybody using WeWork after that.

</comment><comment><USER40> There is a podcast for the interview Guy Raz did for "How I built this" with Miguel McKelvey [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this- with-...](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy- raz/id1150510297?i=1000386707846) . Thought it was a pretty good startup story

</comment><comment><USER41> Sounds like a cult to me.

Next business idea. WeX. Just put We in front of every building name and get richer just from branding.

<comment><USER42> WeUber - Like UberPool, but everyone takes turns driving

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Cynical answer: he convinced VCs that his particular brand of shared office space was better than everyone else's, actual revenue be damned, _and they believed him_. That's it. Straight from the article: "Neumann declared that WeWork's "valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue.""

<comment><USER44> Their valuation is based on _spirituality_? Are they a business, or a church?

I mean, they can actually be more valuable than other such companies if they get the ambience right. Maybe that's what he meant. But if they're referring to the ambience as "spirituality", I cannot take them seriously. [Edit: And if by "spirituality" they mean something besides ambience, I still cannot take them seriously.]

If I had more faith in the market's rationality, I would short them as soon as they IPO...

<comment><USER45> >But if they're referring to the ambience as "spirituality", I cannot take them seriously.

I dunno, the Catholic church is doing just fine in terms of revenues and real estate assets, and that's just one example. Then again, religious organizations get preferable tax treatment...maybe WeWork will eventually pivot to religion down the road.

<comment><USER46> Unlike WeWork, the Catholic Church (and the mormons and scientologists) have realized that the best tax shelters come from actually owning the property that is used, not leasing it.

<comment><USER47> He owns the properties that we work leases!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I wonder what the price of a cds is on wework.

</comment><comment><USER20> ""valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue.""

 _Literally_ valuation based on 'spirituality'.

Not only do I call 'bubble' but also 'BS'.

Very wary of companies leveraging 'morality' in whatever form (esp. all the way up to 'Spirituality'), unless it's somehow deeply authentic (i.e. a company that makes 'green' eqipment can claim 'greeness' that's fine), and are something to be cynical about. I find it kind of repulsive.

My feeling is that WeWork must be the 'high tech startup' opportunity for all those non-tech 'Goop' reader types.

... like the NXVM of startup land.

Tony Robbins of working real estate + SoftBank.

"There are 150 million orphans in the world. We want to solve this problem and give them a new family: the WeWork family." In L.A., Neumann told his employees that the newly formed We Company would now have three prongs — WeWork, WeLive, and WeGrow — with a single, grandiose mission: "to elevate the world's consciousness."

Just beautiful ...

WeWork's size and scale could put it in a position to help deal with some of the world's largest problems, like the refugee crisis, saying, "I need to have the biggest valuation I can, because when countries are shooting at each other, I want them to come to me."

How does anyone take this guy seriously?

In the comments here there seems to be a lack of calling out on the so many of the gob-smacking authoritarian/hypocrisy red-flags going on here.

The guy's line is preaching morality, spirituality and inclusuion ... while doing the opposite i.e. dropping the least productive 20% staff every year? 'All dudes' in charge? (Nothign necessarily wrong there (maybe red flags), but it's definitely hypocritical)

All of the Kabbalah stuff and social preaching at offsites?

'It's like a capitalist Kibbutz' ... this is double-speak.

And that his background doesn't legitimately speak to any of this, i.e. total lack of legitimacy?

The trick to this kind personality is 1) words have no bearing on reality 2) total lack of self-awareness or consideration such that he can come across as 'honest' even when spouting garbage.

Who else could possibly be talking about 'saving the refugees of the world' like this with a straight face?

This guy is the Donald Trump of Vegans.

<comment><USER26> This guy is a legend. He is exposing how our world is running on bullshit fumes, and how people throw money without thinking out of greed, and becoming richer than a small nation for it. We need more of these modern day Diogenes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> "Hey, would you buy 1 50-billionth of my company for a dollar? Sign this, please. Thanks."

I can probably manage to avoid a down round for a while, but only if I don't run out of cash or accidentally IPO.

(Every month: "Hey, would you buy 1 (1.2x previous valuation)th of my company for a buck? Sign here. Thanks!")

"Revenue is flat but market cap is increasing 20% month over month!"</comment>


The coming debt bust - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21698240-it-question-when-not-if-real-trouble-will-hit-china-coming-debt-bust?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits <comment><USER2> www.economist.com - Access Denied</comment>


"I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging" - <AUTHOR> http://extension765.com/sdr/18-raiders

<comment><USER2> _for example, no matter how fast the cuts come, you always know exactly where you are_

This is a massive problem, both with less experienced directors and even some famous ones. It's important to establish the geography of a scene because if you don't the audience will be constantly distracted during action sequences - Michael Bay's _Transformers_ films are particularly egregious offenders in this regard, despite having massive budgets an thus access to the best skills that money can buy. In the 3 I've seen so far, I end up getting completely lost during the obligatory climactic battle between the good and bad robots after about 3-4 minutesand the only way to get through it is to sit back in numb passivity (which I suspect may be intentional givent he semi- propagandistic nature of these films, but that's another story).

It doesn't help that the geography of many scenes is wholly imaginary, as many scenes are not shot in a contiguous physical location but may involve trick positioning within the same location, two wholly different locations, or apparently contiguous events that are shot at completely different times. Furthermore, there's a rule of thumb called 'the 180 rule' which holds that there's an imaginary line of interest between the primary character in a scene and the object of his/her scrutiny, and that editing continuity demands you pick one side of that line and keep the cameras within that 180-degree side of an imaginary circle - otherwise the audience (and indeed the editors) get confused about who is looking at what and which way they are positioning themselves within the scene. One can break this rule like any other but it needs to be done deliberately and in a way that signals a shift of focus to the audience.

Keeping track of all this during the often-chaotic environment of production is a lot harder than you might imagine. Almost all films, even vary large- budget ones, have at least one shot where the image has to be flipped from left to right to correct a camera positioning error - it's better that Brad Pitt's wristwatch seem to momentarily be on the wrong arm than that the positional grammar be broken by a poorly-chosen angle.

<comment><USER3> For people (not just film students) interested in this sort of thing, I recommend "The Grammar of the Film Language" by Daniel Arijon. A fantastic book that's fundamentally changed the way I see movies.

[http://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Film-Language-Daniel- Arijon/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Film-Language-Daniel- Arijon/dp/187950507X)

<comment><USER2> Seconded. It is the only book I've seen that takes a truly systematic approach. It seems to have fallen out of favor due to the 1970s-era line drawings involving increasingly naked people which some people find sexist or just weird.

Two other books worth mentioning are _The Visual Story_ by Bruce Block and _If it 's Purple Someone's Gonna Die_ by Patti Bellatoni. The first one is about shapes and the second one is about color.

You can pick up all 3 for under $100 and you will get more out of it than most people do from spending many thou$and$ on film school.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Soderbergh has a couple other re-cuts on his site, too. One intermixes the two PSYCHOs, the original and the shot-for-shot remake.

The other is a radical re-cut of HEAVEN'S GATE. I've watched a couple hundred movies this year, but it's that HEAVEN'S GATE edit I keep coming back to in my head. I'm not really sure why (which is probably why). He somehow found the movie lurking inside the sprawling version that was released.

[http://extension765.com/sdr/16-heavens-gate-the-butchers- cut](http://extension765.com/sdr/16-heavens-gate-the-butchers-cut)

</comment><comment><USER5> I watched a few minutes and was really impressed. I don't feel like I have the time to watch all of it, but I totally would have if this was an assignment in a film class (I remember watching a single film 5 times in a row or one scene 30 times).

I made a short film in college and it's terribly embarrassing as an artifact, but I just rewatched it without sound and it's quite awesome that way. :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Hehe, once you start noticing staging, lighting and framing, looking for shadows of the boom mic shadow from above, you won't be able to stop easily. You'll be enjoying a movie and all of the sudden instead of just watching the movie you are explicitly noticing editing cuts and camera positioning and thinking about it.

</comment><comment><USER7> So how were any of you able to watch this? ("Sorry Because of it's privacy settings, this video cannot be played here.")

<comment><USER8> For me it says "The server refused the connection." where the video should be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This really needs a more descriptive title.

[http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/raider-of-the- lost...](http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/raider-of-the-lost-ark- steven-soderbergh/) is an interesting look at a few of the highlights.

<comment><USER10> A hard one for titles. We gave it a try by picking a sentence from the article.

<comment><USER11> Who is we?

<comment><USER12> dang is one of the HN mods</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Par – a paragraph reformatter vaguely similar to fmt, but better (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nicemice.net/par/ <comment><USER2> Does anybody know vim/Sublime Text/Atom plugins that do just that?

<comment><USER3> in vi/m, you can use `1,$!par`

<comment><USER4> Or '%!par'</comment></comment></comment>


Fortune.js - RESTful, HATEOAS APIs made easy - <AUTHOR> http://fortunejs.com

<comment><USER2> This is really cool - it reminds me of Sails.js [0] but is simply a node module you can include in package.json without having to use custom commands to launch the app.

Something they should put as a huge feature at the top (IMO) is that it uses Express & supports Connect middleware.

[0] [http://sailsjs.org](http://sailsjs.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, one of my motivations to build this stems from Sails.js. Its ORM, Waterline, currently doesn't support associations between resources, so I built a persistence layer that does that myself. This is crucial because in order to fully support the concept of HATEOAS, resources need to be able to link to each other.

In the future, I might actually cut out Express from this framework, but still accept Connect middleware. The reason for that is because I don't want the user to be concerned about routing or having to manually set routes, so a thinner router might be in order.

<comment><USER2> OK, it looks like hooking this up with Angular directly is not going to work without pretty major changes. Angular's resource module is set up to work with "broken" JSON APIs out of the box, presumably because most are set up that way.

Angular has way more to it so I'm probably going to leave it as is and continue hacking away at Fortune to make it a little more forgiving with the requests it handles.

I also exposed one more express method in /fortune.js:

        Fortune.prototype.static = function() {
          return express.static.apply(express, arguments);
        };

Since Angular is all client side just creating a public folder was enough to serve up the required pages from the same app:

        app.use(app.static(__dirname + '/public'));

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, by the way, you shouldn't need to serve the front-end app from the same server as the API. By default, Fortune gives you CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing), so that clients from any domain can consume it.

Also, Fortune should work out the box with Ember Data and my JSON API adapter: [https://github.com/daliwali/ember-json- api](https://github.com/daliwali/ember-json-api) . Not to say that you should ditch Angular, but it will probably need quite a bit of modifications to its data layer to get it working with the JSON API spec.

I will be working on a full, non-trivial example of what an Ember.js + Fortune.js application can be in the coming week(s). There is a current implementation that's in production at my company, but its unfortunately closed-source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can't believe I missed this post! This project is amazing.</comment>


By the Way, What Have You Done That's So Great? - <AUTHOR> http://www.launch.is/blog/by-the-way-what-have-you-done-thats-so-great.html <comment><USER2> Great writing. Easy to imagine Jobs writing that speech.

<comment><USER3> wow... that's high praise. if only i could create like I write. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Excellent article Jason.

RIP Steve.

<comment><USER3> thanks BF

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Create create create

<comment><USER3> ... and then create some more

<comment><USER5> On the way home could you pick up a jug of create? Might run low tomorrow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is so easy to criticize. And so difficult to create -- especially to create something radically different and then put it out there for a world of non- creators to comment on.</comment>


I Hacked My Diet with Science - <AUTHOR> http://thras.blogspot.com/2009/08/diet.html

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure if following a low-carb diet qualifies as "hacking" (Atkins published his book in 1972 afterall), but congrats on the weight loss.

<comment><USER3> If it takes a link bait title to get this message across, then I'm all for it. This diet is essentially Primal, similar to the Paleo Diet (<http://www.thepaleodiet.com/> ). I've been doing it for a while now, and have nothing but good things to say about eating this way.

An introductory link: [http://www.marksdailyapple.com/definitive-guide-primal- bluep...](http://www.marksdailyapple.com/definitive-guide-primal-blueprint/)

An index into most of the content: <http://www.marksdailyapple.com/primal- blueprint-101/>

FAQ, and comparisons to other diets: [http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the- book/references/questions...](http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the- book/references/questions-and-answers/)

<comment><USER4> I seriously doubt any cavemen or any human other then modern man, ever had regular access to THIS much animal protein and fat. During peak times, migratory season, sure, but not all the time.

And I don't think the diet as described, most calories from meat, cheese and eggs, is the most healthy. Perhaps healthier then any diet high in processed sugar, depending on individual physiology. I certainly agree sugar is bad for you, but I think a "mostly plants" diet, is still better for most people.

<comment><USER5> Paleolithic people practically ONLY had access to fat and protein. The only non-domesticated edible plants in most places are available for, like, three months, and aren't nearly abundant enough to live on.

Go take a walk in practically any ecosystem and find edible stuff that's not an animal. There's barely anything. Primitive man clearly ate mostly animals and fish.

<comment><USER6> I believe this is false. The traditional Bushman diet depended more on vegetables than meat, and they lived in a place where vegetation is about as far from lush as you can find.

<comment><USER5> Not sure what a traditional bushman is. Are you refering to the san bushmen who eat a lot of mongongo nuts? That is a strange exception, and those people are hunters who eat a lot of meat anyway.

There are abundant written accounts of native north americans. There were those who grew corn and squash, which means they have little in common with paleolithic humans who had no such crops. And there are those that did not grow crops and ate mostly game and fish.

Anywhere away from the equator there is virtually no gatherable plant food for most of the year. Before domesticated crops, people clearly ate mostly animals, fish, and insects.

<comment><USER6> San = Bushman. The reason I mentioned them is that they preserved their hunter-gatherer culture till a few decades ago, and anthropologists were able to measure what they actually ate, which was mostly vegetables.

You respond to this contrary evidence by simply restating your claim. There was "virtually no" plant food, and people "clearly" lived mostly on meat. Do you have any evidence at all?

<comment><USER5> I pointed out the San are a rare exception. You were trying to make a general case from this. The other ethnographies and historical accounts show high meat consumption. I also suspect the san you are talking about are stunted and trying to get by on marginal land without much game, and so not a good sample.

It bears repeating the simple fact that most places don't have wild plant food for most of the year. Pick up the army survival manual. It's mostly about how to fish and trap in many different ecosystems, because, as it explains, there isn't much wild plant food out there most of the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I always like to see a little more science in articles that use the word "science" in the title.

<comment><USER8> Ditto for "hacking." I mean, good on you thras for losing the weight but it seems to me that what you're really hacking here is the global food economy. An all meat-and-horticulture diet is completely economically infeasible for a great number of people, to say nothing of environmental impact or sustainability.

<comment><USER9> Regarding the environmental impact and sustainability: [http://www.westonaprice.org/mythstruths/mtvegetarianism.html...](http://www.westonaprice.org/mythstruths/mtvegetarianism.html#1)

Here's another take: <http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/vegetarian.html#link1>

One missing piece regarding the idea of sustainability of ruminant farming versus grain farming is that the former tends to rejuvenate the soil, and can be performed in areas unsuitable for crop growth. The latter, on the other hand (unless performed in concert with ruminant farming), encourages deforestation (to locate healthy, nutrient dense soil), using up the nutrients in the soil, maintaining the soil via petroleum fertilizers, and then abandoning the land once depleted/eroded.

Ruminants are a key piece to the puzzle in sustaining the fertility of the soil when growing crops.

<comment><USER8> Oh I'm all about eating meat, just not exclusively. Both of those links advocate grazing livestock, which I 100% support and think it also tastes better. Better than the grain-fed meat that is so cheap and plentiful in the US (I think that's where thras is.) But meat raised that way is more expensive, which makes it difficult to eat only meat and greens (the latter of which are likely to be trucked halfway across the country.) This is how he's "hacking" the food economy: taking advantage of agriculture subsidies that distort the price of meat.

Exclusively eating local produce, grass-fed beef, free-range chickens and their eggs is not only seriously expensive, but in many parts of the US (like where I am) nearly impossible.

Whole grains and legumes, however, are pretty healthful and easy to grow, AFAIK.

<comment><USER9> Of course I was simply addressing the sustainability comment, not the economics involved.

Regarding economics, I suppose the unanswered question is how would a reallocation (or reduction, depending on your political bent) of government subsidies affect the feasibility/availability of grass-fed beef compared to the CAFO variety? What would happen if grass was subsidized instead of/in addition to grain?

Even now, it's possible to buy sustainable meat at comparable prices ([http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2006/12/13/how-to-buy-a- si...](http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2006/12/13/how-to-buy-a-side-of- beef/)) if you go in for a half or quarter cow. However, this involves quite a bit of work (if only it were as simple as logging into buymycow.com and ordering 200lbs to be vacuum sealed & delivered at your doorstep!).

<comment><USER8> > 200lbs to be vacuum sealed & delivered at your doorstep!

You're making me hungry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In passing, weightlifting is mentioned. I think this is perhaps as relevant to the story as diet. Even if weightlifting has always been a part of the story, boosting protein and the resulting increase in muscle mass, can account for dramatic fat loss, as well. Muscle burns more calories than fat, so it is self-reinforcing.

<comment><USER11> I'm also doing a low-carb diet, for a month and a half. No exercise of any kind. 6 kg lost, and counting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> While I'm sure this approach has general merits, I'm also fairly certain that different dietary approaches will work with varying levels of success for different people.

</comment><comment><USER13> Eggs (yolks) have a load of cholesterol. Watch out for that. IIRC, they're about 200mg each, where a sensible daily limit is 300-400mg.

EDIT: If you want to go all crazy-health-nut, the whites are 100% protein calories (~50/50 fat/protein in the yolks), have no cholesterol, and taste pretty much the same.

EDIT again: But I guess you don't really have much else in the way of fat sources, cheese aside. If you do this long-term, you might want to make sure your blood cholesterol levels don't go nuts.

<comment><USER14> If you read the book mentioned in the article, he also talks about how the whole "eating cholesterol is bad" is also a myth and bad science.

<comment><USER13> Maybe. I've heard a couple people with similar diets wonder why their plasma cholesterol is so high, whether or not it's from the dietary cholesterol. YMMV.

<comment><USER15> Your body makes more than 60% of the cholesterol that you need daily. 500mg of cholesterol are about 1/3 of what you need every day.

<http://www.extension.iastate.edu/Publications/NCR332.pdf>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> While the article does not go into specifics about the "Science" involved, it is not hard to find hard science that show unequivocally that only lowering calories lowers weight, eg. this one from the New England Journal of Medicine: <http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/360/9/859>. Why is the first law of thermodynamics so hard for people to internalize? Shall we start measuring the energy in stars in terms of grams of fat too? One expects this kind of thing on Oprah, not on HH.

At any rate, let's assume for a moment that the blogger is still eating the same number of calories, and doing the same amount of weight lifting (that is, still burning the same number of calories), but he is still losing weight. To be consistent with the 1st law of thermodynamics, it will mean he has made his body less efficient at absorbing the calories in food. So he has successfully shocked his metabolism into being less efficient. Will he stay on this diet forever? Because as soon he starts eating bread again, presumably his metabolism will emerge from the state of shock he induced. When that happens, while he will feel as if he were eating the same amount of calories, he will effectively be eating much more since his metabolism will no longer be so inefficient.

<comment><USER9> Different nutrients are processed differently by the body, fully in line with thermodynamics.

Take 100 Calories of sawdust (cellulose). If you eat this, how many calories did you consume? Did consuming these calories contribute to fat accumulation? Because the answer to this is no, does this cause a violation of the 1st law?

Your body doesn't merely "absorb calories" from food. It absorbs and transforms chemicals, and directs these chemicals through various pathways. Eating a low carbohydrate diet doesn't "shock his metabolism" into being less efficient, it simply uses different pathways for nutrient absorption.

Also, regarding the referenced study: All four diets tested were virtually identical regarding the % calories derived from fat, protein, and carbohydrate.

[http://content.nejm.org/content/vol360/issue9/images/large/0...](http://content.nejm.org/content/vol360/issue9/images/large/05t2.jpeg)

Moreover, the low-fat diets weren't particularly low-fat, and the high-fat (low-carb) diets weren't particularly low-carb.

So what happens when you feed a group of people the same 1600 Calorie diet for two years, and then measure their weight loss? What exactly are you demonstrating?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice success, but I am not yet convinced that weight is the only important variable to watch.

<comment><USER9> One of the points Taubes makes in his GCBC book (which is phenomenal, by the way), is that obesity is a dysfunction of excess adipose tissue (fat), not merely a problem of excess weight.

As you suggest, using only weight as the variable means that a dieter who loses 10 lbs of lean muscle tissue is considered as successful as a dieter who loses 10 lbs of adipose tissue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Slightly off topic, but do any of you folks ingest whey protein shakes or use creatine monohydrate before workouts?

FWIW, my current diet consists of fruit, tuna, protein shakes and the occasional chicken breast.

<comment><USER19> Tuna seems to be high in mercury:

<http://www.nrdc.org/health/effects/mercury/tuna.asp>

You might want to substitute some lower-mercury alternatives:

<http://www.nrdc.org/health/effects/mercury/guide.asp>

<comment><USER18> Good lookout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Good for you, but ... some details would be nice. Reads like a lazy blog entry. Please inform us as to more of your specifics. Do you eat non-veggie carbs ... like, at all?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I thought that I was clear on that: I eat meat, eggs, cheese, and green vegetables. That's it.

I suppose I do use wine, salt, and other seasonings when I cook. By "meat" I mean meat, poultry, and fish.

I don't worry about no-calorie drinks. I drink mostly tea. Sometimes diet soda. It doesn't seem to make any difference.

<comment><USER5> No eggplant, squash, onions, peppers, and such? Just greens? Sounds boring.

Also, no organ meat?

<comment><USER21> Most people in the US don't eat organ meats (other than what's in hotdogs).

<comment><USER22> That's too bad. Fried liver, delicious if they're plump and juicy. Chicken hearts, they're like little meat popcorns. I don't know if pig ears are considered organs, but they're crunchy and fun to eat.

<comment><USER23> I had fried pig ears on a salad at The Spotted Pig in NYC and they were f'ing fantastic. If I could source pig ears, I'd eat nothing but pig ears from now on.

And bone marrow. Om nom nom nom nom.

<comment><USER24> _If I could source pig ears, I'd eat nothing but pig ears from now on._

You need to visit more Chinese food markets.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"That is either genius, or a seriously diseased mind." – Linus Torvalds - <AUTHOR> https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/3/20/845 <comment><USER2> In that post Linus says something I don't understand in that post:

"... So with a constant, we have

      sizeof( 1 ? NULL : (int *) 1)

and the rule is that if one of the sides of a ternary operation with pointers is NULL, the end result is the other type (int *)."

Is Linus saying that the condition of the ternary operation doesn't matter if one of the sides is NULL? That it then always evaluates to the other side? That's not what happens when I try it. Or are there special rules when sizeof is applied?

<comment><USER2> Oh, I get it now: Linus wasn't talking about the values, but about the types. In this case, the result will be a NULL pointer of type (int *).

Sorry, nothing to see here.

<comment><USER3> I just had the same confusion. Thanks for figuring it out so I didn't have to!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really need this for libc optimizations. So far it only worked in C++ mode or newer clang's, but not in gcc.

</comment><comment><USER5> Isn't this what GCC's `__builtin_constant_p()` does?</comment>


Amazon turns Cloud Drive into a Dropbox rival with file syncing - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/amazon-turns-cloud-drive-into-a-dropbox-rival-with-file-syncing/ <comment><USER2> I guess Dropbox is not going to be too happy about their key supplier competing with them and doing it at 50% cost.

<comment><USER3> I was also under the impression that Dropbox uses S3, but then I read this article in Wired: [http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/flash-data- cent...](http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/flash-data-centers/)

"But if you walk into the right building and down the right aisle, you'll run into a giant Dropbox logo. Clearly, the file-sharing upstart is proud of its data center gear. [...] Inside its cage, Dropbox is running servers equipped with solid-state drives, also known as SSDs — super-fast storage devices that could one day replace traditional hard drives. The company doesn't use SSDs in all its servers, but it's moving in that direction."

<comment><USER4> Dropbox has dedicated servers for metadata and business logic, but the actual file data is stored on S3.

<comment><USER5> Sounds about right, using SSDs to store the user data would be ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So does this mean that I would have a persistent JVM daemon running in the background monitoring file system events? I don't know why, but that gives me a nasty feeling in my gizzard. Besides, something tells me that I don't really need a ~100 MB process to do something like that.

</comment><comment><USER7> This requires Java, is desktop only and doesn't have a solid command line client. How does this rival Dropbox at all.

<comment><USER8> It syncs files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Having to install java is a deal-breaker for me, as Java on windows seems to be a recurring source of drive-by vulnerabilities.

<comment><USER10> Java as a plugin in the browser yes, I've been bit by that earlier this year (thank you MS Security Essentials!)

However Java on your system like the .net framework is no less secure than any other runtime. You are running an executable you are at that executable's mercy

<comment><USER11> Yeah, really a critical PR mess that Oracle hasn't stopped installing the browser plugin. Who uses that anyway? It's not worth the confusion anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good to see some competition, even though it's not quite as advanced. I have been having grave doubts about Dropbox's management since they bought Mailbox and it will be good to get some depth into the field.

</comment><comment><USER13> Dropbox feels expensive when think about the storage space it provides, but maybe we should think more about the syncing side. Usage patterns may differ. In my case I have maybe just 20 gigs of stuff in my Dropbox, but probably I generate quite much traffic since I host all my software development projects there. That also means all the build results etc end up in the Dropbox folder.

And as everybody knows, the syncing mostly just works. And it is fast, almost real-time. I regularly work with the same projects (Java/Eclipse, .NET/Visual Studio, node.js) from three different computers and haven't seen any sync related problems.

I believe is easy to challenge Dropbox on the pricing side, but it will be much more difficult to replicate their syncing functionality.

Two things I would like to see from Dropbox is support for client side encryption and support for long path names. Currently I'm using Boxcryptor to do the client side encryption.

<comment><USER14> Totally agree. Dropbox is perfect. It's super fast, even when you make duplicate copies of huge files (like Lightroom catalogs!). I have a local backup using rsync, and it's much slower than Dropbox.

Dropbox also syncs over LAN, which is a big deal if you use several computers from the same location.

I don't think $99/year is expensive.

(Search doesn't work too good, though).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It appeared to be syncing my entire Cloud Player music folder to my local machine. That's quite a few GB of data -- 12,000 songs or so out of a possible 250,000. So it's not going to be of much use to me until they add some kind of selective sync option.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone know of a good service that does backups? I don't much need syncing, but I have a headless Linux server that currently backs up 50 GB of files to SpiderOak every night (they're usually the same files, so not much data transfer). Is there something like tarsnap for around $25/yr? SpiderOak is pretty good for backups like that, especially since I can check that it's working on any computer and restore files, but it costs four times that and doesn't have a decent headless client.

Any recommendations?

<comment><USER17> I install crashplan on everything. Cross platform (java I think) crashplan+ is 60 bucks a year for "unlimited" storage and I'm pretty sure you can set up the client to be headless. You can also have them generate the encryption keys or just provide them with your own and not upload the private keys to their servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Timely update. Currently am exploring cloud storage options for ALL my files. Anyone has experience with Bitcasa? How do Dropbox/Cloud Drive/Google Drive line up?

<comment><USER3> Been using Dropbox for all my files (I keep it under 100GB) for several years now. So far never had any problems, in fact they saved me from lots of tears when they recovered an accidentally deleted folder beyond the 30 day limit for me. The collaboration and sharing options are another huge plus. I frequently give out the link to a folder which results in a beautiful and intuitive website view of its contents for the recipient. I also have a shared folder with every member of my family which is much more convenient than sending file attachments around. These last two sentences are also why I wouldn't want to jump ship to Amazon despite the attractive price: At least in my case Dropbox has realized a network effect that more or less locks me in.

I did quite a bit of research into other options before and while using Dropbox: Tried GDrive and found the online interface (GDocs) not suitable for the amount of content I have, tried SkyDrive when it was still Live Mesh and had tons of problems with it (hour-long delays when syncing). At one point I tried a peer-to-peer type system (I remember their logo being red, forgot the name) and it was Java based which made it annoying to me. And I tried a system where files were encrypted before transfer (some Dutch company, again forgot the name) and the problem with that was that it was way too slow at dealing with all my files.

<comment><USER19> > (I remember their logo being red, forgot the name)

Wuala? <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala>

<comment><USER20> Wuala _still_ doesn't support camera sync/instant upload.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The setup fails for me (in Norway), timeout while downloading assets from CloudFront.

App seems to be using Jersey;

      Downloading https://d29x207vrinatv.cloudfront.net/Sync/Windows/Application Files/AmazonCloudDrive_2_0_2013_0841/LocalServiceJars/jetty-servlet-8.1.0.v20120127.jar did not succeed.

</comment><comment><USER22> I signed up for it and am planning to use it, but am disappointed it doesn't work with the regular kindle (just the Kindle Fire).

</comment><comment><USER23> "File Sync puts your files at your fingertips from _any_ computer"

...

"Sorry, we only support Windows and Mac OSX at the moment"

I can't say I'm surprised, but that doesn't stop me from being disappointed.

I know they would probably claim puffery, but it's just as bad as companies peddling 'unlimited' usage, IMO.</comment>


Time for the Social Sciences - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/time-for-the-social-sciences-1.16621?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20141225

<comment><USER2> >whether those solutions will gain traction depends on factors beyond their discoverers' ken

That's complete nonsense. As if being a social scientist gives one the capacity to predict the future. The record regarding their abilities at this task speaks for itself.

The rest of the article is simply empty rhetoric.

<comment><USER3> Where can I read the record of the results of future predictions made by social scientists?

<comment><USER2> Not sure what exactly you wish to see. I believe the burden of proof rests on those who would assert that they _do_ make effective predictions.</comment></comment></comment>


Announcing Markdoc - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zacharyvoase.com/post/246800035

<comment><USER2> This looks to be quite useful. I've tested it just now and it works as advertised, minus a couple of installation quirks. It's interesting to me that it follows almost exactly the same principles as text-based blogging system as Jekyll and the like; goes to show you that plain text works.

</comment><comment><USER3> Did you look @ didiwiki <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DidiWiki>

It also uses markdown syntax and the code is VERY nicely written C. It's not a lot of code and pretty straightforward.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ikiwiki seems to target the same nitch as Markdoc. Do you know how they compare?

<comment><AUTHOR> I hadn't seen Ikiwiki before, but initial inspection shows that the setup procedure is tied to the VCS (<http://ikiwiki.info/setup/>), and the whole thing seems too heavy-duty for my needs.

<comment><USER5> Hi, I wrote ikiwiki.

I'm glad to see some (more) competition; generating a static wiki out of markdown files kept in an arbitrary VCS seemed like such an obvious Right Thing that I was amazed nobody had quite done it before when I started in 2006. So it's good to see this and other projects like gitit explore the space some more.

The setup procedure you linked to uses a VCS because most people want to, but ikiwiki is VCS agnostic right down to running w/o one, and can be used in quite light-weight, simple ways. (Ie: Make a directory; put an index.mdwn in it; run `ikiwiki src public_html`to build and publish; done.)

I'm curious: Does markdoc really require its own built-in http server? Or was that included only to ease basic setup? And does it support editing pages via the web? Does its caching allow it to do incremental builds of only changed files, or is the whole wiki re-rendered each time it is built?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Joey,

As I said, I haven't really investigated Ikiwiki, but it does seem like a very comprehensive utility. Still, I was looking for something different, and I'm sure Ikiwiki is a better solution for certain use-cases. To answer your questions:

* No, Markdoc doesn't require its own HTTP server, but being able to run 'markdoc serve' is helpful.

* No, pages can't be edited via the web. That would require an authentication system, and would introduce some difficulties w/r/t version control (or require some VCS coupling).

* The way incremental builds work (at the moment) is that the whole wiki is re-rendered into a temporary directory, and then rsync'd into the HTML root. I'd like to write a 'markdoc refresh' command in future, but at the moment rendering is so fast there's little need to.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Structure Your CSS Better as Components - <AUTHOR> https://restishistory.net/blog/how-to-structure-your-css-better-as-components.html <comment><USER2> The other day I was looking at the output of nbconvert (turns Jupyter notebooks to HTML) and found the default template embeds over 10,000 lines of CSS!

I see the point of munging the names of CSS classes and I'm very interested in the problem of cutting up N HTML documents to produce an N+1 HTML document, which probably requires this.

However, I'm also increasingly concerned about the sheer size of web sites and applications that people are building today and one factor there seems to be more and more stuff that gets added to the stack.

</comment><comment><USER3> Neat! If you're looking for a more advanced library that's easier to use, try [https://www.styled-components.com/](https://www.styled-components.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, styled-components is another good take on the same idea as CSS Modules.

More alternatives include:

\- Aphrodite ([https://github.com/khan/aphrodite](https://github.com/khan/aphrodite))

\- Radium ([https://github.com/FormidableLabs/radium](https://github.com/FormidableLabs/radium))

\- JSS ([https://github.com/cssinjs/jss](https://github.com/cssinjs/jss))

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's also a pretty in-depth comparison on many other alternatives:

[https://github.com/MicheleBertoli/css-in- js](https://github.com/MicheleBertoli/css-in-js)</comment></comment></comment>


What it's like to be young and Venezuelan in a time of widespread chaos - <AUTHOR> https://www.huckmag.com/perspectives/reportage-2/venezuela-youth-crisis-reportage/ <comment><USER2> One word... bitcoin!</comment>


Video: Israeli Defense Contractor Reveals 'Suicide' Drone - <AUTHOR> https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3740287,00.html <comment><USER2> "Suicide drone" is just a trendy name for really old technology. Most people already know of them as "[guided] missiles."</comment>


Protestors in HK pointing lasers at police to avoid facial detection - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/tonysheng/status/1156675276417273856 <comment><AUTHOR> Source: [https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/ck539j/p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/ck539j/protestors_point_lasers_at_police_to_prevent/)

</comment><comment><USER2> If those cops aren't wearing any sort of eye protection...their eyes are donezo, especially from that violet laser at the end. Nasty stuff.</comment>


Kidney Stones Are More Beautiful Than You Might Think - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/health/kidney-stones-geology.html <comment><USER2> They may be "beautiful" to look at through a microscope, but _goodness_ forbid you _don 't_ want to "experience" one! (My experience was only a tiny stone 8 years ago, that was "resolved" by drinking litres of water. Still a goddamned hell that was.)

<comment><USER3> I had 3 stones in my right salivary gland which I dropped when I was 12 or something like that. My experience was: (1) since it was insanely painful and I could feel it with my hand (just above my neck) I kept pushing it forward and forward which made channels inside my right salivary gland to get larger and it's still (after ~10 years) larger than my left gland. (2) My mom never believed me that there is something there, he thought I'm just sick and that's the lymph node. When I finally took the stone out of there with my own effort, she was like "haha there is no way that came out of your mouth, that's probably just leftover food in your mouth". Thankfully my doctor knew better. (3) Every time the stone kept getting smaller (the first one was like ginormous, the third one was barely visible) but I think the smaller the stone, the sharper it gets and god that third one was so fucking painful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If anyone today is struggling with kidney stones, I suggest trying a roller coaster: [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/04/science/roller-coaster- ki...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/04/science/roller-coaster-kidney- stones.html)

<comment><USER5> I really did get one out. Like 4-5mm big, after a roller-coaster. Sudden movements tend to "unblock" stuck stones in the kidney.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seeing plenty of comments on here about not wanting to experience a kidney stone, and while I've not had one, I knew someone who did. He was pretty much the 'hardest' guy I know - very manly, did lots of stuff like rally driving, etc. He used to do motorbike racing, and in once race he fell off and his fingers got caught between the chain and rear sprocket - leading to damage which meant surgery and a permanently disfigured hand - but he still managed to get back on the bike and finish the race. That's the kind of guy he was.

This man described passing a kidney stone as the 'worst pain imaginable', so I can only imagine what I would think it was like... Since that day I've made sure I drink plenty of water.

<comment><USER7> There's a home remedy (not sure if it works): add some baking soda to the water; this will help dissolve the stones or prevent them from forming in the first place. Of course, adding too much can cause other issues such as low stomach acid (digestive) problems.

<comment><USER8> While there are a few things that _might_ slow the formation a bit, there isn't anything that will dissolve already formed stones of the most common type (calcium oxolate). Some of the less common stone types like uric acid stones do have possible treatments in some cases.

Just drinking a lot more water is the only treatment that really does help slow or stop the formation for many people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Having had a kidney stone and having captured it for diagnosis in a piss filter I can guarantee that they really aren't that interesting. Just looks like a tiny little pebble you might find in your shoe. They also hurt. A LOT. As in the kind of pain that made me think, "I am going to just keep yelling until somebody does something to stop this pain."

Seriously, what is the point of this Times article anyway? It's like let's write a big long article about something that means absolutely nothing to anyone and is of zero practical importance except trying to reenforce the dubious idea that good things come out of human suffering.

<comment><AUTHOR> The practical applications of it are explained in the article:

 _Doctors often base patient care plans upon the chemistry and molecular components of a patient's urine. But further research could allow doctors to take advantage of the changing composition of kidney stones themselves, boosting specific ingredients to dissolve the stones completely, without excruciating passage or invasive procedures._

 _"Now that we know a process by which they're growing, the question is, how can we flip the switch the other way, and break the stones down?" said Dr. Matlaga, the surgeon. "If you can intervene at a certain time during these events, you might be able to manipulate the process by which the stones are growing."_

<comment><USER9> I'm not saying we shouldn't study why kidney stones occur and how to treat them, but saying they are "beautiful" does not contribute to our scientific understanding of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I get one to two stones per year because my kidneys are over efficient. I'm fairly used to it now and can usually pass one with minimal discomfort, but every now and then it destroys me. The only beautiful thing about them is when they exit.

<comment><USER5> Can you please elaborate? I am 33, still getting those, precisely 12-18 months apart. Left and right kidneys. My father has them too. I changed my lifestyle a bit - gettnig mode vitamin d3 + vitamin k2 - supposedly that way you get the calcium where it is supposed to be - in the bones and not in the kidneys. I am pretty clean now, maybe for the first time in my life - regular check did not show any stones. But interested in finding what exactly do you mean by over- efficient. edits: Changed my age. Can't believe I was thinking 32, when I am 33 in fact. Duh.

<comment><USER11> Someone I know swears by rowatinex [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/1431192](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/1431192)

I pray that I won't ever need to consider taking it though (passed one stone last year)

<comment><USER5> I take this one as well. Makes you pee more often and has a good effect on me in general! Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Beautiful images. They use "A high-resolution method, called Airyscan super- resolution microscopy"

I'm guessing this type of microscope: [https://www.zeiss.com/microscopy/us/products/confocal- micros...](https://www.zeiss.com/microscopy/us/products/confocal- microscopes/lsm-880-with-airyscan-.html)

And I had never heard of the "Basic Principle of Airyscanning" which is pretty neat: [https://www.zeiss.com/microscopy/us/products/confocal- micros...](https://www.zeiss.com/microscopy/us/products/confocal- microscopes/lsm-880-with-airyscan-/technology-lsm-880-with- airyscan.html#principle)

</comment><comment><USER13> They are beautiful outside me. When they were inside me they were very painful. The feeling of passing them via urine is crazy pain worse then getting kicked in the nuts.

</comment><comment><USER14> As a recent kidney stone sufferer I find it tremendously hard to agree with this headline.

<comment><USER15> As a 15+ years since my last, I too struggle. I mean sure, calcifications are cute. So is stone picked up on a beach. I'll take the beach stone please.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you are starting to get obsessed with those stones, you may want to watch "The Wisdom of Crocodiles" [1]

[1] [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120894/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120894/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I guessing that these images are artificially coloured, given "nanometer-scale auto fluorescence microscopy" as _one_ of the methods. Quite amazing none the less.

<comment><USER18> Yup, the original paper ([https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-31890-9.pdf](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-31890-9.pdf)) seems to suggest this: "SRAF image composed of merged three pseudo-colored red, green and blue (RGB) channels. Brightness and contrast of the RGB channel intensities are adjusted to highlight the dark crystalline fabrics."

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I had kidney stones a couple of times and I was (unpleasantly) surprised to find that you don't pass out from the pain. I had always assumed that, given enough pain I would just pass out.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm waiting for the first hipster hand made kidney stone jewelry.

</comment><comment><USER18> Well, kidney stones are essentially mineral deposits, so I'm not surprised they look so similar to crystalline deposits occurring in nature.

<comment><USER21> Don't worry. The Times is ON IT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've had kidney stones a few times and found into online to be inadequate, so here's my anecdotal summary:

There are 3 kinds of pain you can experience. From talking and reading, everyone can have different experiences.

The first is when the stone is trying to exit your kidney. I've never been stabbed, but "being stabbed in the kidney" is how I describe this. It is pain you can't escape, but hydration helps. I didn't know you could vomit from pain, but you can. At lower pain levels it is more of a painful twinge. This pain can be constant or "wavy" \- I could be crippled for hours or perfectly fine and then switch.

The second is while the stone works its way into the ureathra (I'm probably getting all the locations wrong, but the symptoms are the point). This feels like a UTI - a burning itch and the constant feeling (but not reality) of having to urinate. Despite the low pain levels, I hated this phase the most.

The third is actually passing the stone. This can be a quick sharp pain, no pain at all, or an agonizing drawn out experience. The stones vary in sharpness (stones can have different textures, mine that look managed to catch were clumps of crystal grains and some grit-like mortar, so degrees of effective sharpness also vary. ) "coral" is not a bad description of the material.

Size matters a lot - apparently stones are very normal and people pass tiny ones all the time without knowing. Unfortunately, if one stuck around in the kidneys to get larger and got loose (I have no real idea of what that means in terms of tissues) it can hurt. More unfortunately, the resulting inflamation can trigger more, so it not uncommon to get waves of stones. With a few days or a couple of weeks in between.

Time to pass, indeed, time in each of the three stages can vary. I've been fortunate that most of mine pass in a few days, with the worst taking 3 weeks with an ultrasound attempt to break it up after the first 2 weeks.

I feel fortunate that, despite the intense kidney pain that not everyone gets, I've had only minimal discomfort in actually passing the stones.

One important note: hydration is key to pain reduction. Chug water constantly. My biggest issues were always 2-4 am, when I'd been asleep and not drinking for a few hours - by the time the pain woke me up, I had a few bad hours ahead of me.

There is a lot of folk medicine out there, as well as random advice about diet, including from doctors, but I've not found any convincing nor consistent recommendations beyond water hydration.

Medical treatment is normally to just hydrate and wait it out. Some docs will want an xray to see if they can see if they can see it, but the resolution isn't usually good enough for that to mean anything. A GOOD ct scan can see it, but if are in the US don't bother until a specialist requests it or the specialist will just want it done by them. If the stone is too large to pass on it's own, or taking too long (your call, but probably at 2 weeks) they can hit it with ultrasound to try and break it up into smaller pieces. They may not get it though, so this can take more than one visit.

Lastly, I want to say that debates about pregnancy be kidney pain are stupid. Every experience and every person is different, so let's just agree on "this is big pain" and "big pain is bad" and leave it there. So much of what I found online was just this debate over and over again.

<comment><USER23> My experience was as if I had a very heavy dense ball inside my lower back. This caused waves of severe pain and the desire to go to the toilet (which did not help the symptoms). The pain waves lasted a couple mins each but felt a lot longer. The ambulance arrived and during the trip to the local hospital (<10 mins), I emptied the entinox gas cylinder with only minor relief gained. The A&E (ER) unit sorted it out with some heavy duty iv painkillers.

The ultrasonics can break the larger stones but this effects a certain volume. So if you miss or the stone is smaller, then the ultrasonics can damage the surrounding kidney tissue. I had other stones which were confirmed by X-ray but too small to target effectively.

The advice I got from a number of medics, drink > 2 litres of liquid per day (Any liquid). If the urine is still coloured after the first piss of the day, then drink some more. Other than that, there was no confirmed list of things to avoid.

The first time was the worse as you don't know WTF is going on. After that, I keep my hydration up, carry good painkillers and know when to get to hospital if required.

I agree that the pain debate is pointless, we're all different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> They should be renamed to kidney pearls.</comment>


Ask HN: Who needs contributors? (December 2016) - <AUTHOR> Looking for contributors to your project? Feel free to post any project that may interest HN readers, with a strong preference towards open source. Please follow this general format:
Project name
Project description
What do you hope to build this month?
What kind of skills do you need?
Link to your GitHub or somewhere else you'd like to onboard new contributors, like your project management software or chat room.
Your license(s)
Consider tagging your project's relevant issues with "ask hn". To search these issues, go to https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=state%3Aopen+label%3A%22ask+hn%22&type=Issues&ref=searchresults <comment><AUTHOR> National Voter File ([http://www.nationalvoterfile.org](http://www.nationalvoterfile.org))

We're building the first open source, publicly available national voter database in the United States to power grassroots campaigns, monitor voter suppression, and make door-to-door advocacy possible for anyone.

Monthly Goals:

\- Create loaders for new states

\- Enhance reliability of existing loaders

\- Create Python geocoder to tag households with lat/long

\- Develop queries to explore data quality

\- Begin work on flash API

Skills needed: PostgreSQL, GIS, Python, Pentaho Data Integration (we can help you learn)

Slack Signup: [http://goo.gl/forms/8SJRDlo7Lx2rUsan1](http://goo.gl/forms/8SJRDlo7Lx2rUsan1)

GitHub: [https://github.com/getmovement/national-voter- file](https://github.com/getmovement/national-voter-file)

Dimensional Data Model: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/169mIkiIdl4OetbGvnbVCzq9S...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/169mIkiIdl4OetbGvnbVCzq9Srw9PKCsB6U1CErTD9aI/edit?usp=sharing)

Information on state voter files to load: [http://voterlist.electproject.org/home](http://voterlist.electproject.org/home)

Pentaho Data Integration: [http://community.pentaho.com/projects/data- integration/](http://community.pentaho.com/projects/data-integration/)

License: MIT

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Code Corps ([https://www.codecorps.org](https://www.codecorps.org))

We're helping volunteers and donors contribute to software projects for social good.

Monthly Goals:

\- Polish edge cases in Stripe integration for monthly donations

\- Redesign task UI

\- CSS work to move towards BEM, flex box, greater responsiveness

\- Minor features in blog

Skills needed: Elixir, Phoenix, PostgreSQL, JavaScript, Ember.js, HTML, CSS, Sass, WordPress, UI and graphic design (Sketch a plus), dev ops (Docker, AWS)

Slack: [http://slack.codecorps.org/](http://slack.codecorps.org/)

Elixir Phoenix API: [https://github.com/code-corps/code-corps- api](https://github.com/code-corps/code-corps-api)

Ember front-end: [https://github.com/code-corps/code-corps- ember](https://github.com/code-corps/code-corps-ember)

WordPress blog: [https://github.com/code-corps/blog.codecorps.org- site](https://github.com/code-corps/blog.codecorps.org-site)

License: MIT

</comment><comment><USER2> CloudForest

Ensembles of decision trees (boosted, bagged) in golang. It's a project I started as a research platform and it has some great features not found elsewhere and good computational performance. There are also a couple of companies using it in production and some researchers using it in computational genetics.

[https://github.com/ryanbressler/CloudForest](https://github.com/ryanbressler/CloudForest)

BSD-3-clause

This month:

I'm just starting development again after a bit of a hyatus. This month my main goal is to do some basic maintenance and work with some people who've forked it to bring features and bug fixes back into main.

Then I want to duplicate some xgboost like features including parallelism that will work with boosting and 2nd order gradient boosting (using the hessian instead of just the gradient).

And i'd like to to utilize go's newish shared object support to make it callable from python and R.

Skills Needed: go programmers confident in writing low level machine learning style code or python/R/etc programmers interested in maintaining a wrapper. Data scientists interested in using it and providing feedback on performance.

Onboarding: I just set up a google group where people can introduce themselves: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/cloudforest- dev](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/cloudforest-dev)

I'll work on cleaning out the issue tracker and prioritizing things so people can pick them up if they want.

</comment><comment><USER3> Freeciv-web is an open source HTML5 and WebGL strategy game. We're working on a new 3D WebGL version.

[https://github.com/freeciv/freeciv-web/](https://github.com/freeciv/freeciv- web/)

License: AGPL.

</comment><comment><USER4> YouTuLong

TL;DW chrome extension for YouTube. Any video on youtube can be TL;DW'd and anyone who opens it and has the extension installed can run the TL;DW'd version. The extension allows users to remain on YouTube (i.e. not 'stealing' traffic). The website allows to create TL;DW's (not editing the actual video). Requires Google credentials. Side project, just one guy (me).

This month I'm going to add a bit of social discovery (i.e. share buttons, etc) and then finally refactor, restructure and take it seriously, because it's just an idea I had a month ago but now I really want it to become something.

I need content. Please create TL;DW's for lectures, tutorials, etc, and skip the smalltalk, boring parts, bad jokes and off-topic. And then share (manually, until I add the social stuff). Thanks!

Extension: [http://goo.gl/rhwid5](http://goo.gl/rhwid5)

Website (create, discover TL;DW's): [https://youtulong.com/](https://youtulong.com/)</comment>


Ask HN: What features does Prometheus based monitoring lack wrt. to APM tools? - <AUTHOR> I think many people here use Prometheus/Grafana for infra and application monitoring esp. in Kubernetes now. It is almost the default OSS solution.
What features you find that  Prometheus/Grafana lacks compared to full-fledged APM like DataDog - which makes you consider trying a paid APM?
Some features which I can think of are reporting - like generating  PDF reports to send it to team or management. Another is a visualization of overall infra - in terms of server maps and microservices in them, and graph of calls between them.
What are other such features you find lacking in Prometheus/Grafana compared to paid solutions? <comment><USER2> Logging, Tracing, Analytics from myMind.stack.pop()</comment>