Ask HN: Here is my current batch of ideas. In exchange, I ask for your feedback. - <AUTHOR>

I have a pool of unimplemented (or partially implemented) ideas laying around right now. I've decided to let them go into the wild in order to light a fire under myself to chase after which ever ones (if any) that I "miss" after I let go. Not claiming any of these are original, but I though there may be unique  opportunities in some of them.
In sharing these, all I ask is that you provide feedback on them, even in the form of "I hate 1,2, don't care about 3, 5, 6, and I may be interested in 4."
1. An alternate twitter landing page (e.g. username.twitteridea.com) that each user can heavily style and customize. I'm shocked that Twitter customization is relegated to simple background images and color. Tweets are pulled via client-side javascript, so themes are simple html/css/js. As awful as MySpace skinning was, people clearly wanted it. Viral potential is large here. Main problem, people don't read a lot of tweets by visiting a user's profile. Revenue model a bit iffy.
2. A simplified system for conducting beta tests. Match up companies (thinking micro ISVs or small webapps here -- this is not an enterprise play) that need exposure + a diverse tester pool with people who like being early adopters. Allow testers to earn reputations and allow companies to filter candidates through quality thresholds. Now testers are incentivized to do a better job, so they can get into more "exclusive" betas. Plenty of room to add in social elements here too. I think someone must be doing this but I've yet to Google the right set of keywords to find them. The differentiator here is that it's an offering for testers too, not just companies. Almost creating a marketplace where the currency is reputation.
3. A hosted solution for referrals (non e-commerce - this is not an affiliate system). I posted about this here once at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1280478. Basic idea is to host a system/api that lets you build per-user referral codes, track those referrals, and then provide widgets to let you give users badges, show top referrers, things like that.
4. A guided daily diary. Inspired by Keen's Simple Diary. http://www.simplediary.com  Pose simple questions to allow people to reflect on each day. Short and sweet, no feeling of obligation. Okay, that's just a rehash of the book itself. Now make it interesting by crowd-sourcing the guided questions or making them social (amongst your friends). Share entries etc. Favoriting answers. This needs more fleshing out. Big problems are: content until you solve crowd-sourcing, and how to monetize.
5. Private blogs/microsocial sites for families. Keep it fun and easy - think Tumblr. #1 use case is just sharing photos - email sucks for this, nor am I friending grandma on Facebook to share photos, and almost all blogging platforms I've seen besides Posterous do not offer a reasonable password protection system. But after photo sharing, I think family member activity streams could be fun, and you could integrate some location functionality so kids could "check in" easily without having to call/txt etc. There are a lot of ways it could go. I posted about this at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385447. The offerings I can find - myfamily.com, familysays.com, and famiva.com are truly wretched. Seems like a huge opportunity here.
6. Site monitoring that goes beyond the simple "is it up"/ping/L7 health check junk. Gomez and Alertsite et al. are fine solutions but stupidly expensive. Just stupidly expensive. Seems like there is a gap you can slide into here between those two ends of the spectrum. Real admins measure their page latencies not just uptime. (Note: just found out about http://www.watchmouse.com today, which sort of moots this... seems to be just what I envisioned at the price point that I imagined could succeed.) <comment><USER2> #2 Like it, but it feels somehow like it'd be a though one.

#4 I think vox.com does that. Whatever happened to vox btw? Is it just hanging in there, bringing in some ad revenue?

#5 I was thinking about this yesterday. Definitely a need. Photos + stories are huge, think family sitting around picture albums.

#6: yea, totally. I always thought site monitoring where you can send it events from your backend or js. Google analytics has events, but can't send it from backend (ie. signups, ...)

<comment><AUTHOR> 2 - yeah, I think there are multiple challenges - #1 sales cycles and custom requirements #2 how to bootstrap testers #3 the infamous problem of "no one googles your solution when they don't know the concept exists" -- do companies think "oh i should go look for a company that provides beta testers?" don't think so. maybe it just means that paid search won't work. maybe it just needs a lot of CPM marketing on sites for developers and good old word of mouth.

4 - not sure, never tried vox.

5 - no one seems to be directly attacking the vertical very well. i think "families" is a vertical, right? :) some things you can repurpose to get what you want, but the average person would never think to use it that way. the ones that are specifically built for families -- well they're either just awful, or seem like some kind of re-skinned groupware.

6 - you can do that in google analytics. it's a hack, but you can definitely post up metrics from the server side, if you just build up the urls that it needs. but anyway, this is definitely something where i was just thinking more about availability and performance monitoring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> #5: the demand seems to be there. Assuming this is a freemium, then the challenge will be to acquire enough customers. You would assume that after the initial drop-off, the data gathered would be very valuable and people would want to keep paying... So after building the basic tech, it becomes a marketing play? I'd love to hear more thoughts on this, or perhaps good sites, because if I found a good one I'd use it. (Not sure what defines good here though.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Ironically I'm tackling 3(<http://flow.cloudomatic.com>) and 5(<http://www.genevine.com>) right now.

I like 2 a lot as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> These sites look great. I love that you can get started at Genevine without signing up, I tried to do that at <http://todoneapp.com> too. The price point seems a bit high (consider that Flickr is what, $25 a year or so?) - but the functionality looks spot on and the website is really elegant. Same thing with Flow.. seriously, who does the design? I love it. It seems more focused on e-commerce/affiliate than I intended for my own idea; I think I was specifically trying to avoid that angle because there are SOOOO many solutions out there. But yours looks like it could stand out :)

Thanks for the feedback on #2. I'm starting to think I should make a go at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Humble opinions:

1\. Easy to implement, but I don't know if people would be interested in it. Another downside is that twitter can pull the rug under your feet at any time.

2\. Interesting. I'm not sure if the benefits for testers are big enough.

3\. I have no opinion on this; I don't like the referrals in general (except free "word of mouth") anyways.

4\. nice but as with any social site it's hard to get the initial people and critical mass.

5\. Hard to differentiate enough or see the real benefit when there are so many blogs/facebook/etc applications out there.

6\. There are definitively lots of monitoring services of all kinds, prices (from zero) and features. It would be interesting to have one addressing a very particular niche one or at a particular feature set / price point as you said.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like your feedback, since I am a pessimist and can see the truth in all your criticism :)

1 - totally agreed it's a Twitter feature waiting to be vacuumed up. but it's SO easy to implement. and I know how to make it go way viral. i think? :)

2 - why does anyone beta test anything? i think people just like feeling special, having special access, being early adopters, being influencers, etc. plus, i imagine the site as totally having badges/rewards built into it by design. and version.future - framework to allow companies to reward their testers (name in credits, direct payments, tip jar, whatever)

4 - agreed. maybe i could use #3 to solve this problem :)

5 - i know there's a market for this one, just from being a parent and knowing lots of parents. i don't think facebook is acceptable since there are weird issues with friending your parents etc, and grandmom is probably not even on the site. blog-wise, there are verrry few blogging platforms that have the right security controls.

6 - agreed. it would be easy enough to try something simple: 10 urls, 10 sampling nodes, 10 tests an hour, $10 a month - and just see what kind of interest is out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> With regards to #6: The bank I used to work at used Gomez and we were (well they probably still are) paying out the ying yang for a handful of tests each hour against a few core webapps.

So I had this idea to create a distributed monitoring service that would use nodes (similar to the genome@home project) with actual residential internet connections to give websites a true idea of how fast their site was from different locations around the world. Node owners would just be regular people, and they would get a small percentage of the revenue from each test they ran, and the infrastructure would be designed such that a failing or slow test result would initiate verification tests from other nodes to insure that it wasn't just an issue due to the node's internet connection slowing down or failing. Gomez runs different test from their own servers around the country and sometimes we could tell what the issue was based on which nodes were down (i.e. the west coast server is the only one that's failing). So we'd have all these nodes running all over the world and we could tell people "well here's how quickly this page and all it's resources load from New York City, LA, and Russia..." and give them historical and real time metrics and notifications based on those response times.

I got as far as creating a client that worked relatively well and was ready to upload results for each test ran to a master server, plus it made requests to the master server to see what the next test it needed to run was. With all the other availability testing services out there I kind of moved on, but I've still got the source if someone is interested.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I've been a Gomez user before and the pricing was utterly shocking, to say the least. Additionally, I think our pricing plan only even allowed tests from 10 nodes or so. I was wondering if I could write a php endpoint that acts as a testing node and just buy cheap hosted php boxes all over the world on as many backbones as I'd need to cover. Obviously testing through real users is better, but 9 times out of 10 the interesting stuff in Gomez is a function of problems in your backend, not ISP problems... and anyway, what are you going to do about those? We got all kinds of false positives when the Gomez nodes would glitch out. Almost no signal and all noise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> #5 - I actually started developing this one, called KinCMS (stupid, but descriptive), but got a job before finishing it - and thus, never got back to it. I never let it go, either, and some of it's code formed the basis of Noostr recently. I guess I should get it working and launched, eh?

#6 - Again, something I had started and had working for my own servers a few years ago, but never expanded or monetized. I don't think I have my old source code anymore though...

</comment><comment><USER7> #6 -- you should check out nagios. We have many thousands of checks running on all aspects of our infrastructure. Allows for email, text messages, etc notifications on OK, WARN, and CRITICAL events. There are plenty of plugins already available but if you want something custom create it... it's free and open-source.

For example, we have checks to see if there are fan, drive, power supply, etc, failures within systems. We also monitor main power feeds, UPS, ventilation, etc on site infrastructure. You can also monitor/graph/check history of websites and their load times.

EDIT: you might also want to check out ganglia from the OS side. This doesn't allow notifications (as far as I know) like nagios but you can instantly see what your resources are being used on in larger machine clusters.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, Nagios, Collectd, Ganglia etc etc etc are all options. But I'm talking about something hosted, external, URL-based (so we can find user-facing problems), and most importantly simple and affordable. Something where you might be okay spending $10-$100 month rather than having to have someone manage a fine-grained internal monitoring system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> #2 has a lot of promise, based on the gap I experienced first hand working for a very large software company. They have supposedly a complex infrastructure to get beta users but had extreme difficulty in extending it to thousands of users and consolidating their input.

I would consider #5 as the weakest idea in the bunch. There are an enormous number of existing sites that offer the same premise. In fact, one could even use Facebook in the same way when the family restricts the friends to other family members.

</comment><comment><USER9> I like pretty much all of them, though have no use for any of them.

#1 would be super simple and I predict very popular. Could build an ecosystem of template designers ala wordpress themes.

#2 All I can think of is mechanical turk.

#3 takes the work out of having to build all that yourself.

#4 I imagined this like a daily email service a la Groupon instead of a webapp.

#5 How does this not already exist?

#6 I'd like to steal this one but don't have the time

</comment><comment><USER10> #1 doesn't really solve a major problem for a lot of people.

I like #2. I've been thinking about something similar (Feedback for Startups - <http://www.nilkanth.com/2010/05/21/6-ideas-off-my-chest/>)

Simple Diary (#4) looks cool, but I'm not sure if it can do more than a hobby.

Family network (#5) sounds interesting. Facebook, and other family networks, are just bloated.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1 - not sure about that. i know it's not a problem, but there may be a need. it might only target the younger end of the twitter demographic. i think the proof is in how feverishly people customized myspace, and added widgets to their FB back in its earlier incarnations. even LJ - you mostly read it through your friends page (e.g. your own theme), yet you still themed it to show off to whoever visited your profile.

2 - interesting. did anything come of you getting your ideas off your chest? :)

4 - agreed. it's probably a hobby or in the best case a one hit wonder.

5 - i think something really customized to the problem could be successful. everyone is forced to shoehorn social networks or blogs (e.g. CMSs) into the solution. i really picture something that's fundamentally different, while incorporating elements of each.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> 1\. Great idea, agree on limitations but I would def use it. 2\. Love it - would use 100% 3\. Building sth like this currently (+ affiliate) 4\. not for me 5\. this is a great idea. If you are serious about this, email me I know someone in this space looking for help 6\. Not techie enough to understand the value of this.

</comment><comment><USER12> There is something I really like about #4 the guided daily diary. I wonder if you could turn this idea into a dating site -- users can submit a guide and the top ranked ones get answered the next day. Users of the site can browse everyone's answers for that day.

</comment><comment><USER13> I like #5 quite a lot. You could probably monetize quite well by selling print versions of the online content they generate. The one caveat though: it's got to be simple enough for grandma/grandpa.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've not seen this mentioned yet, but there is a mac only version of 2) already <http://macdeveloper.net>

</comment><comment><USER2> ps #6: is there a reliable solution to track respone times (latency) over time? I want to enter, say, 10 urls, preferably some with a cookie (loggedin), and see from various locations how fast they are (including js, images, ...). I'd pay 10$/month for this. I don't need any other features, just good, easy and reliable latency/speed measuring, so that I can work on improving it and actually see results (or not).

</comment><comment><USER15> #2 I've been working on for 2 months and will be releasing in a week or two... I'm still debating what the name should be, any ideas?

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you using your product to test your product? :)

<comment><USER15> Yes, my App will be on the list of Apps accepting testers! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> <http://www.launchly.com/> is doing #2 I believe

<comment><AUTHOR> looks deadish?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I had thought about a variation of #2 at some point but I've been too busy to implement anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's beginning to stick out to me as the one thing from this list that I should make a go at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I hate 1. , I like 6. and I'm not interest in the rest.</comment>


Mozilla CEO threatens to fire person responsible for anonymous hate speech - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/24/9202067/mozilla-ceo-chris-beard-reddit-hate-speech <comment><USER2> Regardless of whether the person who wrote that should be fired, calling that post "hate speech" demonstrates a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of what hate speech is. It is not merely exclusionary speech, and it is not merely speech that singles out particular groups - only protected groups. Holding particular political views - no matter how popular or right they might be, and no matter how persecuted you may feel for holding them - does not qualify you as belonging to a protected group.

If you want to fire this person, fire them for misrepresenting the Mozilla organization in a public forum. Stating that the tech industry will be better off without feminists - while a pretty stupid opinion to have - is not even remotely "hate speech", and while it might make Chris Beard feel a little more righteous to call it that, it does not reflect well on his capacity for rational thought.

<comment><USER3> I think you're using the wrong standard here.

From Wikipedia:

> Hate speech - outside the law, is speech that attacks a person or group on > the basis of attributes such as gender, ethnic origin, religion, race, > disability, or sexual orientation.

"Marginalized political views" isn't in that list, but then again it doesn't purport to be a comprehensive list.

However, it seems like you're relying on a particularly legalistic view of what "hate speech" is. Is hateful speech toward a group truly not "hate speech" until a legislative act deems the group protected? On face, that doesn't seem right.

You're right about "hate speech" _as a legal term_ , but I don't think the CEO of a non-profit speaking to his employees requires that level of scrutiny.

<comment><USER4> It's vague, it's expansive, its informal usage is frequently conflated with its legal usage. And all this is a feature of the term, not a bug.

<comment><USER2> A feature for who? I prefer precise language and being understood.

<comment><USER5> It's not very good for being precise or understood, but it is quite good at being a weapon. The vaguer the definition of a crime, the easier it is to accuse your political opponents of it while minimizing equivalent or worse behavior by your allies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Mozilla CEO Chris Beard is saying that hyper-sensitive permanently offended types are welcome within Mozilla. This creates a terrible working environment for those who want to have a job without the politics. I can't see Mozilla as an organization continuing to exist for very long with this kind of leadership. If I were a current employee at Mozilla, it would be time to shop my resume around to saner workplaces.

<comment><USER7> > Mozilla CEO Chris Beard is saying that hyper-sensitive permanently offended > types are welcome within Mozilla.

No, he's saying that employees using public forums to call other employees (including former employees) "batshit insane" are _not_ welcome within Mozilla.

That's kind of distant from whether the _target_ of that attack is welcome (whether or not they are actually "permanently offended"); its not inconsistent that Mozilla would both come down hard on this type of hateful speech (even where it might be accurate) _and_ not be welcoming to the people for whom the description, or even just the "permanently offended" part, was accurate.

> If I were a current employee at Mozilla, it would be time to shop my resume > around to saner workplaces.

Good luck finding a place that tolerates this kind of public attack by employees against other employees (even the kinds of places where the leadership might publicly make such attacks on a disliked outgoing employee are unlikely to tolerate underlings doing so independently -- the privilege of painting a giant PR and legal target on the company like that is generally reserved fairly narrowly, where its tolerated at all.)

If that's really something you need in a workplace, I'm not sure any place that would lose you for that reason would do anything but breathe a sigh of relief for the bullet they dodged down the line by your departure.

<comment><USER5> > No, he's saying that employees using public forums to call other employees > (including former employees) "batshit insane" are not welcome within > Mozilla.

Let's do a thought experiment. If the post had been, "[NAME] was one of those batshit insane men's rights types. I'll be glad when all of his kind have left Mozilla and taken their misogyny elsewhere," would the CEO be reacting in the same fashion? Would The Verge write approvingly about it?

If not, then we're really not talking about some studiously neutral principle, and we should stop pretending that we are.

<comment><USER8> Well, feminists want equal rights for women. A misogynist hates women.

One of those is compatible with the companies code of conduct and the other isn't. So I think it's fair to treat them differently.

<comment><USER9> But 13thLetter didn't say "misogynist", he said "men's rights types". Certainly many of them hate women, just as clearly as many feminists hate men, but that doesn't automatically make all of either type haters.

<comment><USER8> He literally said: "taken their misogyny elsewhere"

<comment><USER9> You said "feminist" and equated it with "misogynist", not "misogyny".

I say the relevant equivalents are:

Feminists and men's rights types.

Misandrists/misandry and misogynists/misogyny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is awfully petty behavior on the part of a CEO, digging up a comment buried ten layers down on a two week old Reddit post and then promising to destroy its anonymous poster. At _best_ , it makes out Beard to be some kind of paranoid control freak. At worst, it makes it seem like that Brendan Eich thing wasn't a one-off.

<comment><USER7> I doubt the CEO dug up the content; more likely the potentially libelous comment was brought to Mozilla management's attention by someone else, possibly the recently departed employee who was it's target.

<comment><USER10> Libelous? Ha! This is your ordinary hyperbolic run-of-the-mill free speech here. Sure it's insulting but it's not something that could be reasonably shown as libel or legally defamatory (as in false).

Here's what you call libelous written by Aoiyama:

"The rest of mozilla would disagree with you. Everyone hated her because she was an asshole Social Justice bully and frankly people are sick of her divisive stupidity."

"Frankly everyone was glad to see the back of Christie Koehler. She was batshit insane and permanently offended at everything. When she and the rest of her blue-haired nose-pierced asshole feminists are gone, the tech industry will breathe a sigh of relief."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Going on a witch hunt to identify an employee who went through the trouble of speaking anonymously sounds like a bad idea.

<comment><USER12> How would this be a witch hunt? The third definition from [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/witch- hunt](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/witch-hunt) is "A public smear-campaign against an individual" which seems to better describe the actions of [https://www.reddit.com/user/aoiyama](https://www.reddit.com/user/aoiyama). One could try to be pedantic about the second definition, "An attempt to find and publicly punish a group of people perceived as a threat, usually on ideological or political grounds.", but if you read the posts at the reddit link and the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines at [https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/about/governance/policies/part...](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/about/governance/policies/participation/), even if you don't agree with the Mozilla ideology, the aoiyama one is clearly incompatible with the Mozilla one.

If the only course of action is to say "Oh no! They used a throwaway account, so there's nothing we can do about the toxic environment posts like this create for members of our community!" that doesn't bode well for having a non- toxic environment. And since I do need to disclaim that I am a MoCo employee (but 100% speaking for myself alone), I should also mention that you will find in that list of posts a link to [https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/35u1yp/an_email...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/35u1yp/an_email_was_just_sent_out_at_work_with_2_free/cr7s34l?context=3) where the contents of a Mozilla Corporation internal-mailing list post were reposted. So even if one wanted to write this off as just a random internet troll, the situation is that there is either a MoCo employee intentionally harassing another MoCo employee and Mozillian or a MoCo employee passing information to someone doing the same thing.

I do want to be clear that I am not attributing these hypotheticals to your one-sentence reply. But I also want to be clear that we can't write off this type of toxic behaviour as acceptable because of the risk of being perceived as engaging in witch hunts/star chambers/other hyperbolic misapplications of known-bad-terms.

<comment><USER5> "If the only course of action is to say "Oh no! They used a throwaway account, so there's nothing we can do about the toxic environment posts like this create for members of our community!" that doesn't bode well for having a non- toxic environment."

How on Earth was that comment "creating a toxic environment"? It was added a week and a half after the original post went up. By that time nobody but the most obsessive are still reading the same Reddit post.

Calling it "toxic" and having the CEO himself declaim from the pulpit about how this random throwaway account on Reddit with all of six posts to its name over the span of three months must be destroyed seems like using a nuclear weapon to kill a fly.

<comment><USER12> The flies add up. There's not a harassment noise floor beneath which we should ask the harassed to just shrug off harassment by their coworkers.

<comment><USER13> _There 's not a harassment noise floor beneath which we should ask the harassed to just shrug off harassment by their coworkers._

I'm not gonna argue what side this is on, just that there is there is a floor. They're called "haters." Conventional wisdom is to shake it off. (Just think about the time spent getting down and out. You could have been getting down to sick beats.)

Different people will have different opinions on if this is above the floor and actions should to be taken in response. People are going to to disagree about when actions cross boundaries, so simply labeling actions as harassment doesn't cut it to make everybody agree with your view that it has crossed boundaries.

<comment><USER14> Upvoting partly for partial agreement, but mostly for the taylor swift quoting

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand what the perpetually offended anti-"social justice" types are complaining about here.

Anon poster publicly and forcefully says he hates working with, or even in the same industry as, a large class of people typified by a particular recently- departed Mozilla employee. Mozilla CEO proposes to directly resolve the problem if the person who raised it can be identified. Seems like a win-win for all involved.

</comment><comment><USER10> Based on the tweet streams shared by the former employee she labeled her 'exit interview', I'm more going to side with the anonymous employee. The former employee basically went on a complete rant ripping across Mozilla on twitter, but when it came to specific details, we end up with "never got a firefox t-shirt that fit me" and "nobody listened to my ideas" Talk about embarrassing yourself while burning a bridge. That kind of bridge burning is indicative of the kind of coworker she would be to some people.

Where does this weakness come from? Is it mental illness or just a parenting thing? And she also seems to conflate the ideas of software accessibility with "safespaces." If that's the kind of ideas that she was peddling to her colleagues, I'm pretty sure they aren't going to buy into that.

I don't know if it's a feminism thing or a LGBT thing but suddenly there are these new words that were invented, showed up in sketchy sociology classes and these people reform their individual reality by them and expect the rest of the world to suddenly be part of it. But they never asked whether these things were actually truthful or useful. Suddenly people are supposed to refer to themselves as 'CIS-gendered' and worry about 'safe spaces' where you won't 'trigger' anyone from too loud of applause.

The CEO should never have brought up this issue in a public meeting. It's an internal matter. And his misunderstanding of hate speech is disappointing, I have no respect for Mozilla as a company at this point. CEO needs to be removed, not the person who spoke their mind anonymously on reddit.

</comment><comment><USER15> This seems like damage control more than an actual threat. CEO getting ahead of the story before any bad press can make it something.

<comment><USER10> There's no story here. The only story is how bad The Verge and Mozilla CEO are stooping to even try to perpetuate or drum up something. Employee gets fired, goes on twitter rant. Former coworker calls her a psycho, her twitter rant fits the diagnosis.

Any press picking this up aren't worth anyone's time, especially the CEO of an organization. sheesh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Mozilla lost me today. It's no longer an organization I can support. Let this be a lesson to you. Don't indulge the perpetually offended. They will never be happy. Their presence is a cancer in your organization. Should they apply, reject their applications. Should they be hired, fire them. Should the cancer metastasize, leave.

<comment><USER17> Same here.

Can we still not like people and say it? Is it still ok to say that we don't get along with someone, that we're happy to not work with them anymore without having it cataloged as "hate speech"? Just because I don't validate your beliefs, or your ankle tattoo or your pink hair cut or where you spend your vacation doesn't mean that I hate you! I just disagree with you, get the F over it.

And the whole "He commented as a Mozilla employee so that's not ok" is BS. Are they gonna start a witch hunt for all the commenters on HN and Glassdor who speak about what it _really_ is to work there?

<comment><USER7> You can say you don't like working with someone, but if you publicly, forcefully, vitriolically express your hatred for working with not just one person, but a class of people in your workplace typified by one person, and your employer doesn't share your distaste for having those people in the workplace, you shouldn't be surprised if your employer resolves the incompatibility you've exposed to them by assuring you don't have to work with them any more.

<comment><USER17> I see, so if I understand your comment, employees should fully embrace their employer's values is what you are saying? Otherwise they should be terminated.

Wasn't there some outrage a while ago when an employer decided that they didn't want to financially help their employees use contraceptive or abortion? Based on what you are saying it was their right to push their beliefs down their employees' throat. Maybe they should have fired the employees who didn't fully embrace their values too.

Did this employee ever misbehave with the person who left? Did the fact that he/she didn't embrace her belief get in the way of his/her work? I doubt it, otherwise the comment wouldn't have triggered this whole thing.

Most people are grown ups, and can be around and collaborate with other people who don't necessarily fully agree with them.

<comment><USER7> > I see, so if I understand your comment, employees should fully embrace their > employer's values is what you are saying?

You do not, then, even approximately understand the comment.

There's a pretty big excluded middle between, on the one hand, fully embracing one's employer's values, and, on the other, publicly, forcefully, and vitriolically propounding one's hatred for working with particular individuals and wide classes of people within one's industry.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Feedback for "growth hack and UX ideas" website - <AUTHOR>

Hi!
I built with RoR a site which features a list of growth hack and UX ideas: http://growth.userium.com
Later I will enable users to add new ideas themselves. However, new ideas will probably need to be held for moderation before publishing, in order to avoid spam.
I would love to hear any feedback / suggestions on how to improve the site!
-Nina <comment><AUTHOR> [http://growth.userium.com](http://growth.userium.com)</comment>


A Lisp interpeter in a thousand lines of Bash - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alandipert/gherkin/blob/master/gherkin <comment><USER2> As a nostalgic trip, a little over 30 years ago I was playing with Randall Beer's LISP interpreter which ran in MS Basic on a TRS-80 model III, very slowly, as seen on page 176 at this link (this is the first in a multiple article series)

[https://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing- magazine-1983-...](https://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing- magazine-1983-03)

I distinctly remember as a kid it was very slow indeed, but interesting.

I got lost reading the ads. In retrospect, computing used to be a much more expensive hobby than it is today. Not just relative terms, but absolute terms. Then again, people are much poorer now, so its required.

Anyway, since 1983, he became a neuroscience prof and mentions his BASIC LISP on his homepage

[http://mypage.iu.edu/~rdbeer/](http://mypage.iu.edu/~rdbeer/)

The line numbers are not consecutive, but I think he's well under a thousand lines of BASIC, there just aren't enough pages of code in the listing to exceed that.

And yes, this was considered reasonable coding style back then. That is why this generation never shrank in terror at the sight of bad Perl code. Why yes, this is a bit hard to read, but I've certainly seen worse...

<comment><AUTHOR> Slightly related to the "let's implement Lisp on weird languages/platform" theme, here's awklisp, a project that apparently helped/inspired Dipert to write Gherkin: [https://github.com/darius/awklisp](https://github.com/darius/awklisp)

<comment><USER3> In 1983, the TRS-80 was a mainstream computer. BASIC was also a mainstream language - so was Assembly. Even a decade later, before the explosion of the internet, getting one's hands on a C compiler typically meant paying for a commercial implementation...probably on floppies and delivered over the shoe net.

<comment><USER2> This is true, but I think by the standards of the 2010s most of the defining characteristics of early 80s MSbasic would be considered really weird.

Line numbers. Control flow exclusively by if/then and for/next. We Love GOTO (noobs probably don't know what a GOTO is or why some considered them harmful). No namespaces, everything was a giant global shared namespace where $T meant the same thing everywhere. No naming conventions for variables (like Hungarian or CamelCase). No one used revision control. No unit tests. No symbolic debuggers (they were coming, soon, and something like them existed for assembly, but this was 1983 and not-assembly). For better or worse, no REGEXes. No object orientation, pure procedural. Everything is in one file because quite a few people had no disk drive and relied on cassette tapes. Line editing was a little crude compared to modern vim/emacs and pretenders to the throne. No IDEs until Turbo Pascal and the like quite a few years later (Or was quickbasic first? Either way it would be a long time...)

By modern standards MSBASIC is pretty weird.

<comment><USER3> BASIC is perhaps one of the less weird things about computing the early 80's. It was the high point for women studying computing in universities - well over a third of all computer science degrees were awarded to women: three times the ratio found today. [1]

But more to your point, by the 1990's the idea that computer languages should be understandable by non-programmers with a reasonable education and a general familiarity with the principles of computing was dead.

Think of CoBOL. If its approach hadn't been abandoned for the obfuscations of C++ and Perl, Eric Edwards wouldn't have written a book and gone on the lecture circuits to spread the gospel of ubiquitous language. There's a reason the unschooled learned HTML and PHP in the 1990's - they were accessible to moderately educated people and could do useful work in the same way that CoBOL and BASIC were by design.

The TRS-80 ran a version of TinyBasic. The use of line numbers and GOTO allowed BASIC to run closer to the metal - GOTO 15 is an Assembly Language JUMP to the address of where ever the instruction on line 15 mapped by the assembler. Without it, BASIC would not have been such a successful path to a higher level programming language for serious programmers steeped in assembly language. GOTO is handy if you want to translate from Knuth's MIX without a lot of fuss.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing#The_Gender_G...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing#The_Gender_Gap)

<comment><USER4> Many older BASIC implementations are interpreted, and it looks like Tiny BASIC was as well:

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

It's strange to look back and see just how popular virtual machines were at the time. BASIC typically used one, as did many other languages. Smalltalk is famous for using a virtual machine, for example. Microsoft's original Mac apps all ran bytecode in a virtual machine.

It seems crazy, because these computers were already tremendously slow, relatively speaking, and adding a virtual machine makes it much worse. However, it was ultimately a useful tradeoff because these machines were even more limited on RAM than they were on CPU power, and using a virtual machine with bytecode that allowed for an efficient instruction encoding could save a lot of space. It doesn't matter how fast your code runs if it doesn't fit in RAM, after all.

<comment><USER3> Speed is of course relative. Interpreted BASIC is faster than working things out by hand. For something critical, Assembly Language was always available.

On a TRS-80 Model 1, compiling means the compiler, the input and the output have to live in 4k of ram (or 16k in the later versions).

Considering that the Level I TinyBasic interpreter lived on a 4kB ROM; Level II lived on a 12kB ROM; and Mass storage for most early machines was audio tape - not only slow but also notoriously prone to not loading files correctly, the compiling code would have been great for masochists, not so good for people who were just trying to get something done.

And that's before considering the complexities of tuning a compiler to optimize code.

<comment><USER2> Having been there, there exists an intermediate step of tokenized code. So you store ascii strings as .. ascii but as you enter source code a "then" as in if/then gets tokenized into hex 0xD6 or something. So the poor CPU doesn't have to run a full lexer at runtime to see if the "t" belongs to "to" or "then" it just matches hex 0xd6 which is much faster. This works real well if you have 128 (or so) or less tokens in your language. This can also save a huge amount of memory, depending on your coding style I suppose.

Tokenization also allows some syntax error detection to occur as you type code in, which was interesting. I don't remember enough about this. Obviously some mistakes won't tokenize at all or will tokenize into gibberish.

So tiny basic in memory stored plain old ascii and saved plain old ascii to cassette tape. lvl2 msbasic stored tokens in memory although it could optionally save pure ascii to cassette tape. This had some interesting software distribution issues and compatibility issues as it was sorta kinda half way possible to save something on lvl1 and load it into lvl2 if you were careful and vice versa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is fascinating. I assumed it was yet another ridiculous attempt to build something in an environment completely unsuited for it, but it seems that they are serious. But they're also sufficiently aware of the craziness of the project that the first thing they do is explain just why the heck they're doing it:

[https://github.com/alandipert/gherkin/wiki/Why- gherkin%3F](https://github.com/alandipert/gherkin/wiki/Why-gherkin%3F)

The short version is that bash is the closest thing to being universally available on every UNIXoid system no matter what, and so by writing stuff in bash, you make it so that it can run everywhere. But because bash sucks to program in, this is a minimalist interpreter for a sane language. You can then write programs in that language, and they will only depend on bash and on this interpreter, and the interpreter is simple enough not to need any sort of complex installation.

I can't quite think of a use case for this where it's not worth e.g. installing Python first, but it's an interesting project all the same.

<comment><USER5> > I can't quite think of a use case for this where it's not worth e.g. > installing Python first

Whereever you get Bash, you can reasonably assume Perl5 (unless in an initrd or something). Even on some old AIX 4 I had a readily available Perl 5.005.

Nonetheless I wish there were more actual shells that were not sh descendants.

<comment><USER6> Bash is probably a stretch in more initrds anyways (IIRC, Redhat used a very light sh-like shell).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I started a project like this about 10 years ago, but then I discovered that you could just compile Lisp on your own workstation and upload it to prod with a .sh extension and no-one would actually check, they would just blindly run it. Not even the size was suspicious. Used the same trick abit later with OCaml and Haskell, you just compile them as whatever.py and no-one's any the wiser.

</comment><comment><USER8> ReadMe ==> [https://github.com/alandipert/gherkin/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/alandipert/gherkin/blob/master/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER9> \+ - * / even doesn't support multi-data. (+ 1 2 3) would be 3,stupid

<comment><USER10> Cool, awesome, great point. I tried Googling for your implementation and couldn't find it. Could you drop a link?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There a UUOC in strmap_file, in fact all those uses head, tr, and tail could likely be just handled by sed.

</comment><comment><USER12> interpeter => interpreter</comment>


What Medium Is - <AUTHOR> http://dashes.com/anil/2013/08/what-medium-is.html

<comment><USER2> I think the author's point is reasonable, that Medium attempts to act as a 'YouTube' for articles. However, I believe there are key differences at this point in Medium's evolution (I do believe they will change their model over time).

For me, thinking writing an article, Medium offers the following: a possible readership/distribution (assuming I get picked up by editors), no long term commitments, no investment in set up (as opposed to a hosted personal blog), and little friction in posting.

As an idea, having a streamlined essay posting & sharing process seems good, however I think that Medium will need to address the following issues going forward:

* Serious authors will eventually want to build their own identity/brand. I think much of posts in HN that criticise Medium comes down to this issue. When you write for Medium, you almost seem to detach yourself from the work. YouTube addresses this problem by offering channels with revenue sharing. This means that the amount of time required to publish a piece of quality output for free can be justified to some degree. For Medium though, I see this limitation as restricting its content to be published by those that do not intent to write regularly and do not already have an outlet for their writing.

* Dealing with signal vs noise. Assuming the above is not addressed, and Medium continues to be a place where semi-serious, or novice, authors essentially practice their craft, then there will be a lot of crap for people to sift through in order to read some content that appeals to them. If Medium editors are tasked with this job, that in itself would be a manual process that would be difficult to scale.

* Curating content when authors have no commitments. When people write a blog, it needs a title, which will usually indicate what the general topic of the blog is about. Although authors can deviate from time to time, I find most successful blogs are generally on-topic as the author develops expertise both in the area of interest and in his/her ability to communicate their ideas surround the topic. However, on Medium, this commitment is no longer required. You can sign in, write, and your output is only loosely linked to you as an author. This means that there is no simple predictor of content category and quality.

Personally, I would very much like to see a platform where people can post, be read, and ideally get some compensation for their writing if they can find an audience; basically YouTube for writers as the article states. However, I think Medium is still a fair way away from that model at this point.

<comment><USER3> They can offer author branding when they reach whatever threshold they've chosen. They can even put branded authors together in a specific collection just to keep in line with their typology. I'm not sure about how they'll resolve your other arguments, but the branding complaint I see a lot on of on Hn, and it's weird to see cause they're a start-up and something like that is when, not if.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If a platform has to work this hard to define and explain what it is, it might not be that great of a platform.

Still unsold: Why is Medium better for individual expression than starting your own blog?

Further: If SEO is doing what it should do, why should I care how my articles are arranged on my own site? What genuine advantage does Medium offer regular, non-hyper-connected authors (especially in it's current, invite-only publishing state)?

<comment><USER5> "If a platform has to work this hard to define and explain what it is, it might not be that great of a platform."

Reminds me of the first years of twitter. People either loved it or hated it. But, almost no one understood it.

"What genuine advantage does Medium offer regular, non-hyper-connected authors"

About 100 first readers. I guess that depends on the channels you post on. I only made 3 posts all in "what I learned building" collection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In essence simply an attempt by a friend (fully disclosed in paragraph one and worn as a badge of honor) to get more discussion and press around medium. Part of the campaign to gain an audience for medium.

(Of course not taking Anil's reputation into account this would actually work much better w/o the offered disclosure allowing someone else to point that out and for Anil to respond to the controversy and create more press and commentary.)

<comment><USER7> My intent was really just to engage in a dialogue that was already going on (see e.g. Alexis Madrigal's Atlantic piece), but I can understand that perspective. Truth is, lots of people are talking about Medium, way more than would be impacted by me writing something on my personal blog. If this we're trying to be some clever PR strategy, it'd be a hell of a lot dumber than them just getting regular press. (Which I think Businessweek just did on its own anyway?)

<comment><USER6> Hadn't read that yet but it certainly follows the same pattern.

And that "to be sure" was buried a little more than what you said so clearly:

"clearly driven by Medium's in-house editors like former Wired.com chief Evan Hansen (for whom I used to work)."

Having pulled off PR that made it to the front page of the WSJ and having made it many times into the NYT I know a good thing when I see it. My comment was more like a "watch and learn" for anyone not realizing what is going on with this.

Way to much is being made about Medium considering what it is. If it hadn't been started by you know who it would have a much less critical mass of ink.

That Atlantic article is totally over the top. (I enjoyed reading it of course!)

Things like this make me wish I had the time to blog (I don't I can barely find the time to comment on things I'd rather make money but not the type that you get paid if you get paid to write for medium).

I enjoyed what you wrote by the way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why all the verbiage? The essence of Medium should be described in two sentences.</comment>


Strangest ad for a database you will ever see - <AUTHOR> http://www.howradical.com/databases-from-the-edge-of-sanity An ad torn from a magazine for a database called Kaleidoscope. <comment><USER2> Just because a crazy person writes an unreadable book or hypes a kookoo vaporware doesn't make them an acceptable target for mockery. They exist in the fringes of computing, every comp.* newsgroup has a resident bat-shit- insane guy who writes volumes of nonsensical gibberish. Some might even take out an ad in a trade publication.

The tell-tale signs are pseudo-mathematics coupled with rich imagery, obsession with patterns and directed-edges, active verbs that don't make sense, agent-based AI and a vocabulary that is borrowed back from Victorian- era science.</comment>


Why It Seems Like Bullies Are Everywhere–and How to Stop Them - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-it-seems-like-bullies-are-everywhereand-how-to-stop-them-11594743348 <comment><USER2> [http://archive.is/ptzc6](http://archive.is/ptzc6)</comment>


Show HN: A CLI battery monitor for OS X - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/arvindx007/Battery-CLI-Monitor I have a macbook pro that doesn't have a screen, and couldn't find any shell scripts that would monitor battery life for OS X/Intel. So I wrote a trivial one. Suggestions are appreciated, my bash skills are pretty much nonexistent. <comment><USER2> Nice. But "Copy to /usr/bin" should really be "Copy to ~/bin or /usr/local/bin". Copying randoms stuff to the system directories is not a good idea on OS X.</comment>


Oracle Live SQL - <AUTHOR> https://livesql.oracle.com <comment><USER2> I like the shorthand notation:

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3788882/Capture.PNG](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3788882/Capture.PNG)

</comment><comment><USER2> Great start to a SQL Helper site. I like that it is made with Oracle APEX</comment>


Hong Kong architect turns shoebox apartment into 24 rooms - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-iFJ3ncIDo <comment><USER2> The most difficult thing that I find about many of the really cool tiny apartment layouts is that it is REALLY hard to replicate similar in poorly laid out apartments. I could do wonders with a square 300sq/ft apartment, but some of the apartments we have here in Boston have such weird layouts (pipes in random places, poorly placed doors & windows, strange walls sticking out randomly) that it makes it really hard to do.

This is highly inspirational however.

<comment><USER3> This is a lie that I think is told in every IKEA showroom. 300 square feet is rather functional given the space is well laid out i.e. long and narrow without much obstructing the walls.

The trouble is, it's difficult to find an ideal small space. I've lived in under 300 square feet for over two years in the past, half of the time with a roommate. A single misplaced pipe or radiator can screw up the possibility of a space entirely, and too square an area can produce too much walkway and less "effective" square footage.

<comment><USER2> Exactly. I've often thought at Ikea that I wish I could just live in one of their showrooms.

The real irony here is that half of these poor layouts were architects/builders/remodelers trying to be smart and fit as many people into a space as possible and make it so that people would fit into less space. However, due to them doing a really poor job at this when these places were built (or redone) then you end up needing more square footage to live than you would if it was properly laid out.

I'm totally happy living in less than 350sq/ft, yet I end up looking at apartments closer to 600sq/ft generally due to poor layouts.

<comment><USER4> I don't think architects necessarily want to play 'room tetris', it's just what happens when you have property developers on one side, and building regulations on the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Autowash!?"

</Obligatory Fifth Element Quote!>

I highly recommend a hammock to anyone that is wanting to save space. I slept in one for 2+ years, and haven't found anything as comfortable since. It takes a little while to get used to, but it's great for your back - despite what you may think.

</comment><comment><USER6> Also, with all that pushing and pulling it doubles as fitness center.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is incredibly cool.

Of course, you'd have to put stuff back in its proper place every time otherwise the system would quickly break down.

<comment><USER8> Very cool indeed. Too bad you will need a lot of money to create a home like that -- i imagine it'd cost at least 10 grand to renovate a home like that, and countless hours of hardware hacking :)

<comment><USER7> True. Although with HK property prices I imagine that it's quite a good deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 Here is a book by Gary Chang on the same topic, sounds like it touches on the 30 year history of the apartment itself:

 _Intriguing as it is brilliant, architect Gary Changs 30 year-long project involves a continual experiment with his small apartment in a Hong Kong building block. Partly biographical though the way that it documents specific changes, needs and desires, it is also an ongoing study of what he calls the extreme conditions of Tight-Space a global phenomenon in which increasingly people live in high-density, hyper-urbanised environments. Photographs of various stages of the apartment are presented throughout and accompanied by plans, sketches, writings and observations._

[http://www.amazon.com/Gary-Chang-32m2-Apartment- Transformati...](http://www.amazon.com/Gary-Chang-32m2-Apartment- Transformation/dp/9889984261/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272269769&sr=8-1)

<comment><USER9> Hah... he thinks 32m2 is small? Try 16m2 (I'm sadly actually living in a 16m2 right now)

<comment><USER10> He grew up in the same apartment with his parents, three sisters, _and a tenant_.

<comment><USER9> That's probably unbeatable :) (ok, short of India probably, and I don't want to try and beat it).

<comment><USER11> The like and worse happens in the US all the time. Some migrant workers live in higher densities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Its definitely a great little place, although I think it would be unbelievably cooler if the sliding rooms were automated/motorized in some way.

Just imagine it, you "leave" a room so it starts to pack itself up and depending on which way you turn, it starts to unpack the other room, giving it more of a organic freeflowing form.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, although if it was motorized you'd go to sleep one night and wake up sandwiched between the bathroom and the library the next morning thanks to a bug in the software.

<comment><USER13> A lot of libraries I've seen in universities have mechanized sliding shelves. They have sensors to ensure that if something is in between them, they won't close. Still though, it's easy to imagine someone getting crushed by their bed because a sleepy programmer made an off-by-one error at 4am. Guess I should probably go to bed...

<comment><USER14> The systems they use for controlling the doors of trains and buses seem quite forgiving. (At least in western Europe. Turkish door closers seem more determined.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Commentary on the New York Times article posted last year: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=435034>

</comment><comment><USER16> Life imitates 1938 Disney--cool that someone finally got it right; I wonder if he can modularize and sell his system. (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9p8iaKVOAw>).

<comment><USER17> And Disney imitates 1920 Buster Keaton.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgpQ-K7n2uc>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This could only work for people living on their own. What's gona happen if one person wants to watch tv and another wants to shower? Also the tinted windows would get very annoying after like 1 day, they would make you feel sleepy. Very cool design though.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is a great example of someone embracing constraints and thinking of creative solutions.

</comment><comment><USER20> Article in the times this weekend about a similarly sized (though differently decorated) apartment in manhattan. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/realestate/25habi.html>

</comment><comment><USER21> You would think they would choose a color other than yellow for the windows since it just makes the Hong Kong haze look worse... Or perhaps the windows aren't tinted...

<comment><USER22> It makes the HK have look good, actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Somewhat reminds me of the small house movement in the states: <http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/>

</comment><comment><USER24> It would be interesting to try this concept out on liveaboard boats. They have much the same problems of not enough space.

<comment><USER25> I think if you did that you might end up with problems with weight distribution, depending on where the walls were. You could end up trying to walk around a boat tilted over at 30 degrees from the weight :)

<comment><USER24> That was my fist concern as well :-) It could probably be solved with proper fasteners and thinking about weight distribution though. Moving heavy stuff from port to starboard might be a problem but moving stuff from front to back not so much.

<comment><USER26> Or possibly clever counterweighting under the floor, if you have the floor space. Old-school mechanical linkage might not work very well (too complicated to get right, probably), but a few sensors and actuators could do the job very well, or I suppose as much as it offends my computer nature a manual level somewhere could work too. (But _soooo_ much less cool.) I don't think this could solve the entire problem, you'd still have to consider weight distribution, but it would free you up a bit. Trying to do something like this involves enough constraints as it is, anything you can do to relax them will help.

<comment><USER27> Simple mechanical systems that solve interesting problems are far more elegant in my mind than a computerized version. :)

<comment><USER28> Depends on how many things you'd want to link to a few counterweights. A few rfids on some objects and a couple of readers for positioning could do all the linking work you need.

<comment><USER29> Four linked ballast water tanks (Port Aft, Port Front, Starboard Aft, Starboard front) with pumps between them would probably be sufficient and would be much easier to place and maintain than other moving counterweights.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, your idea is much cooler than mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> He redefines the IKEA zen.

</comment><comment><USER31> Hey I just tweeted this the other day!

<http://twitter.com/bunsen/status/12555413021></comment>


Nest's CEO Tony Fadell explains why he teamed up with Google - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2014/01/13/nests-ceo-tony-fadell-explains-why-he-teamed-up-with-google-its-about-infrastructure/

<comment><USER2> The cynic in me would be a lot happier with Nest if, rather than the kind of painfully-obvious "its just what we wanted, guys!" position they're posting, if Fadell just said "$3.2 billion. C'mon dude, you think we'd turn that down?"</comment>


Microsoft's great looking surface phone design - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/13/4728184/microsoft-surface-phone-testing-while-nokia-experimented-with-android

<comment><USER2> That is a render from DeviantArt, produced by a person who does not represent Microsoft.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are correct, sorry, I didn't read the caption. [http://jonas- daehnert.deviantart.com/art/Microsoft-Surface-P...](http://jonas- daehnert.deviantart.com/art/Microsoft-Surface- Phone-8-310378612?q=gallery%3Ayronimus&qo=2)</comment></comment>


Fed: What Are We Learning about Artificial Intelligence in Financial Services? - <AUTHOR> https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/brainard20181113a.htm <comment><AUTHOR> Very topical speech from the Fed on regulations (current and future) on AI in Banking industry.

tldr; Opaque AI models are OK in some areas such as fraud prevention and cyber security. But in other areas like consumer credit scoring, transparency is key.</comment>


Brian May completes stereoscopic 'devil cards' collection - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/oct/28/brian-mays-stereoscopic-devil-cards-diableries-collection-complete <comment><USER2> BTW, regarding stereoscopy:

> _What most film histories leave out is that the Lumière Brothers were trying > to achieve a 3D image even prior to this first-ever public exhibition of > motion pictures. Louis Lumière eventually re-shot L 'Arrivée d'un Train with > a stereoscopic film camera and exhibited it (along with a series of other 3D > shorts) at a 1934 meeting of the French Academy of Science. Given the > contradictory accounts that plague early cinema and pre-cinema accounts, > it's plausible that early cinema historians conflated the audience reactions > at these separate screenings of L'Arrivée d'un Train. The intense audience > reaction fits better with the latter exhibition, when the train apparently > was actually coming out of the screen at the audience. But due to the fact > that the 3D film never took off commercially as the conventional 2D version > did, including such details would not make for a compelling myth._

</comment><comment><USER3> I saw a load of these for sale earlier this year, at a flea market in a tiny village in France. Stereoscopes come up surprisingly frequently, and they're usually set up with 19th c. pastoralism or pornography. This one was set up with these "devil cards", although I didn't know them for what they were, and wasn't prepared to drop €800 for the (probably incomplete) set. Ended up buying a box of collodion plates from Indochina in the 1870s instead, which I've scanned and sent to Getty for their archives.

It scares me how much history is slipping through our fingers, how much is already lost.

<comment><USER4> > It scares me how much history is slipping through our fingers, how much is > already lost.

And with digital, this is even worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Despite Brian May being one of the greatest guitar legends ever as well as a professor in astrophysics, I can't help but feel like stereoscopy might be his biggest passion of all.

During the Pluto fly-by, he also provided stereoscopic images of Pluto, which help you get a great 3D feel for Pluto.

<comment><USER6> May is not a professor, but does have a PhD in astrophysics.

<comment><USER7> For those who are confused by this comment, a brief note.

In many (but not all!) countries, "Professor" is a job title - it's a position you hold. You are appointed to be a professor in a department, or in an institution.

In contrast, a "PhD" is a qualification. You register with an appropriate institute or organisation, you do the necessary work, you go through the required assessment, and you are awarded the qualification. This is muddled a little by some institutions awarding "Honorary Doctorates", recognising that a body of work done by someone would qualify them for the status of the degree.

So it's possible to have a PhD and not be a professor, and it's possible to be a professor without having a PhD. Brian May has a PhD, but is not a professor.

In some places the distinction isn't so clear, precise, or respected, but broadly, that's the difference.

<comment><USER8> I didn't see any indication of this being the case for Dr. May, but people are often confused about this when non-professors teach college/university-level courses. In this case they typically have another title such as "lecturer", "instructor", or "fellow". This became a minor issue during the 2008 Presidential campaign with Obama's claim of being a "Constitutional law professor"; he did not hold a professorship and his formal title was "senior lecturer".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the Guardian article has a wee mistake. They report that:

" _For nearly 30 years, May has attempted to collect all 182 cards. He nearly made it in 2013, publishing a lavish book with his fellow obsessives Denis Pellerin and Paula Fleming that featured 180 of the cards. This week the book will be republished with a crucial update: the missing two cards._ "

In the description for the book itself[0]:

" _When first published in 2013, this book featured all but two of the 184 scenes in the series._ "

[0]: [https://www.diableries.co.uk/about-the- book/](https://www.diableries.co.uk/about-the-book/)

</comment><comment><USER10> When you have time and money to pursue a hobby, its amazing what kind of cool things one can collect. The guy who created Powerpoint retired in the early 80's and devoted a lot of time to the history of the concertina.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is that _binary_ being drawn in La Loterie Infernale?

<comment><USER12> I'm pretty sure that rightmost number is either a 3 or a 5.

" _And I thought I saw a 2_ "

— Bender, Futurama, _A Head In The Polls_ (1999)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just in time for Halloween promo, how timely.</comment>


No prosecution over 'Gamergate' death threats despite confession - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/gamergate-fbi-file-2017-2 <comment><USER2> > The man "understood that it was a federal crime to send a threatening > communication to anyone and will never do it again," the FBI wrote.

Was his understanding correct? Is it in fact a federal crime to be mean and threatening to someone online? I'm not sure where the line is drawn with respect to protected speech, and the article takes more of a moral than a legal or objective point of view.

> During those months, much of the video game world — which is massive — > became obsessed with the idea that women might ruin the future of games by > persuading game studios to abandon sexy female characters or tone down the > default machismo of male characters.

This is simply false. Yes, the video game world is massive, but the part that discussed gamergate and women in games is very, very small. Most people that play video games have never heard of gamergate, most of the rest have no problem with women in games (in fact, many of those players are women themselves).

The author of the article is living in a bubble. But to its credit, the article does admit

> It is difficult to estimate just how big the Gamergate movement really was > [..] 10,000 users discussed Gamergate on Reddit.

That's probably the best estimate. So 10,000 out of many, many millions.

The article dismisses the alternative narrative of "the authorities investigated and concluded no crimes were committed, thus showing that the concern about gamergate was largely unwarranted," but that seems more accurate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Complaining about an article and then observing that the same article addresses your original complaint kinda moots it. I feel like it would me productive to address the article as a whole rather than to liveblog your reading experience.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I don't understand. How did it address my complaint?

I did try to address the article as a whole, hence the long comment ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> You complained that the article's assertion of scope was simply false, then later wrote:

 _The author of the article is living in a bubble. But to its credit, the article does admit > It is difficult to estimate just how big the Gamergate movement really was [..] 10,000 users discussed Gamergate on Reddit._

The claim you dismiss as false only seems so when taken out of context. Since additional relevant content was supplied in the article, it's inappropriate to consider it in isolation.

Sorry for being terse and replying so late, I've had a busy day.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Articles Every Programmer Should Read - <AUTHOR> http://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2014/05/10-articles-every-programmer-must-read.html <comment><USER2> The list is heavily weighted to implementation details. I'd include a few essays like "The Rise of Worse is Better" ([http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html](http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html)) to encourage programmers to take a step back and think about design and architecture more often.

<comment><USER3> HOWTO: Be more productive [http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity)

On Being A Senior Engineer [http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a- senior-engi...](http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior- engineer/)

<comment><USER4> > Life is short (or so I'm told) so why waste it doing something dumb?

Ooh Aaron... :-(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good list. I would add "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names"[1].

[1] [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names/)

<comment><USER6> [http://wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/?p=15187&lang=en](http://wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/?p=15187&lang=en)

Falsehoods programmers believe about geography

[http://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe- ab...](http://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about- addresses/)

Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

[http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods- programm...](http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-gender/)

Falsehoods programmers believe about gender

[http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2012/06/falsehoods- programmers...](http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2012/06/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about.html#.UaeWSGSG1qI)

Falsehoods programmers believe about networks

[http://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/174763.html](http://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/174763.html)

Falsehoods programmers believe about build systems

[http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods- programm...](http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-time)

Falsehoods programmers believe about time

[http://butgrace.com/2012/06/19/more-falsehoods- programmers-b...](http://butgrace.com/2012/06/19/more-falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-time/)

More falsehoods programmers believe about time

<comment><USER7> All of these are great resources. Just as "Falsehoods programmers believe about names" they are howevere not resources _every_ programmer needs to read (though they may of course benefit from it).

And honestly, a lot of "falsehoods" are really just nitpicking. I mean yes, you may once in your lifetime encounter a user with a real name longer than 2048 characters (or wherever you've set your limit) but really, if those are your biggest problems you're in a really good position :)

<comment><USER8> It is usually the simpler issues that bite you when internationalizing. The separation of first and last names don't always work outside the anglosphere (and sometimes even within it). Some users have 5/6 part names etc etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 10 Articles every web programmer should read. Personally, SEO has zero bearing on my work. Java is only relevant to a subset of developers.

<comment><USER10> I'd argue that the ones on memory, floating point arithmetic and games programming networking have little relevance for most web developers.

<comment><USER11> Any website dealing with any form of sales/money WILL have to deal with FP arithmetic problems sooner or later!

<comment><USER12> Sorry, no. If you are doing your accounting in floating point, you are setting yourself up for really strange non-balancing balance sheets. You can do everything in fixed point.

Remember that fixed point does not mean the point is at the rightmost position. It means it is in a fixed position.

<comment><USER11> Of course, yes. But the naive people will start using FP math - so they have to be warned as early as possible.

I'm doing all my math in fixed point (eurocent), but that has its drawbacks too if you deal with VAT and have to hit a specific total price given only a VAT rate and a net price... or if you're dealing with gas pumps and that x.xx9 cheating. Or scales, where the law requires more precision...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article "How to write shared libraries"[1] also from Ulrich Drepper should be added to the list. At least for C/C++ Programmers.

1 - [http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/dsohowto.pdf](http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/dsohowto.pdf)

<comment><USER14> Link broken. Should be [http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/dsohowto.pdf](http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/dsohowto.pdf)

<comment><USER13> Done! thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "What every programmer should know about SEO"

Yeah, no.

<comment><USER16> Why not? While there are lots of terrible SEO consultants and stupid recommendations, knowing how SEO actually works and the way it rewards good, up-to-date content, is incredibly valuable. And knowing how things really work is the best way to defeat the crummy suggestions and gimmicks that a misinformed marketer might suggest.

<comment><USER17> When the article title includes the words "every programmer", that's a really large set of programmers. I don't think a programmer working on embedded systems needs to know about SEO, nor do kernel hackers, nor do scientific programmers...

<comment><USER18> Until they want their sexy opensource library to be used by more than one person.

<comment><USER19> Make good enough library, keep the source valid and the persons will come.

I have never done any special SEO tricks and yet all my content is fairly high on the results.

SEO in general is quite useless in my opinion. Make the content good enough so that people want to visit the site! Don't trick people to come there.

<comment><USER12> Oh, the engineer marketing moto: make a good product and customers will come. So appealing and so false!

I'm not doubting your experience, but this is such a common misconception that I must point it out.

If usage of your product is not what puts food on the table, by all means go for the engineering marketing approach. It's genuine.

If you need customers to have a roof on top of your head, though, learn marketing. It's not evil, it is necessary, and strange as it may seem, it is as important to success as product quality.

<comment><USER20> I think he means if your website contains information google can find it. simple as that. only thing you really need to know is that text on its own is more easily searched than images. but that should be obvious to any one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> GOTO Considered Harmful

[http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_T...](http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_To_Considered_Harmful.html)

If you actually read the letter you can see that it also applies to modern programming and not just to "goto". Its truly a timeless article that everyone should read (and its really short!)

<comment><USER22> One might argue that this classic article equally applies to callbacks.

You could read it as a manifesto for solutions to callback hell which do not mess up your program's state, such as reactive programming.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ken Thompson's Turing Award Lecture: "Reflections on Trusting Trust"

[http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html](http://cm.bell- labs.com/who/ken/trust.html)

<comment><USER24> This is part of the reading list of Stanford's CS PhD qualification. [http://seclab.stanford.edu/SecurityQual.html](http://seclab.stanford.edu/SecurityQual.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> There should also be an article about how every programmer should write without too many grammatical errors. Some of the emails I used to receive were borderline incomprehensible and I'd have to go battle it out in person.

</comment><comment><USER26> "Numbers every programmer should know"\- Probably the most interesting part of that article is the slider. As you move it up and down, you can see how all the different things get faster over time.

... Except for the final one, "Packet Roundtrip". Networks have reached a physical limit of the universe, the speed of light.

[http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_laten...](http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_latency.html)

<comment><USER27> There is no law that says that information can not travel faster than light is there? The law is just a out mass/energy.

On top of that I believe faster than light transfer of information has already been experimentally shown to exist.

<comment><USER28> _> There is no law that says that information can not travel faster than light is there?_

Yes, there is. Information has to be carried by some form of mass/energy, so if mass/energy can't travel faster than light, neither can information.

 _> I believe faster than light transfer of information has already been experimentally shown to exist._

No, it hasn't. If you're thinking of the CERN neutrino experiments a couple of years ago, that turned out to be an equipment error.

<comment><USER11> Hmmm... shouldn't two linked quantum particles change their state in sync, no matter the distance?

<comment><USER29> I don't think so; see: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/q2/spooky_action_at_a_distance_the_n...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/q2/spooky_action_at_a_distance_the_nocommunication/)

<comment><USER28> It's worth noting that the full explanation given here assumes that the many- worlds interpretation is correct, which not all physicists would agree with. But the "no-communication theorem" is true independently of which interpretation of QM you adopt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> To really make something of the knowledge of memory & latency, an 11th article to get you thinking about how your program interacts with the cache:

[http://research.scee.net/files/presentations/gcapaustralia09...](http://research.scee.net/files/presentations/gcapaustralia09/Pitfalls_of_Object_Oriented_Programming_GCAP_09.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER31> Can anyone provide some good reads on the replaying leap second concept? Has anyone ever taken advantage of this? How do projects that rely on subsecond accuracy and syncronization resolve the issue?

edit: for anyone interested, there has never been a negative leap second (it's always been something like 23:59:59, 23:59:60, 00:00:00). see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Time_Protocol#Security_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Time_Protocol#Security_concerns)

edit2: however, there are negative leap seconds in UNIX time. I wonder if there's a vulernability here? see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time#Leap_seconds](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time#Leap_seconds)

</comment><comment><USER32> Perhaps we can back up a bit. The first reading I used to assign to my students back when I was teaching lower-level classes (I'm a C.S. prof.) is "On Following Rules" by Kirit Saelensminde.[1]

It's a quick, easy read. It makes a point that is important and not hard to understand, but that is often missed. And it provides a framework for dealing with the concepts you get from all those other articles you're supposed to read.

[1] [http://www.kirit.com/On%20following%20rules](http://www.kirit.com/On%20following%20rules)

<comment><USER33> I'd like to add a rule 3: Don't impose or evangelize rules you don't fully understand.

<comment><USER32> Good idea.

Another way to think about it is that if someone doesn't understand a rule, then they are subject to the rule. If they do understand it, then the rule is subject to them.

Kirit is saying that, in the latter case (and only in that case) they get to decide whether to follow it.

One reason your idea works is that, in the first case, they don't get to assume that others are also subject to the rule.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> For every article you tell me I _must_ read, I'll be happy to demand you read 10 articles of my choosing in return.

</comment><comment><USER34> SEO ???

hahahahaaha</comment>


Web Standards for E-books - <AUTHOR> http://www.alistapart.com/articles/ebookstandards/

<comment><USER2> It's a good article overall, but fails to mention Sigil (<http://code.google.com/p/sigil/>) as an alternative to Adobe's InDesign and Thinkubator (disclaimer: I am a contributor to the Sigil project).

Sigil is a free and open source WYSIWYG epub editor which runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.</comment>


Ask YC:  Do you know of any web 2.0 sites where most users are computer illiterate? - <AUTHOR>

And do these computer illiterates contribute much content to the site?<p>This is interesting because the ad revenue from such a site could be much greater than average as computer illiterates are more likely to click on ads (not even knowing they are ads). <comment><USER2> MySpace. I can't count the number of people have asked me some version of "Dude, you're good at computers? Can you help me make a bitchin' MySpace page?"

Admittedly, as the saying goes, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but it seems to me that MySpace is a wealth of user-created content primarily created by the computer illiterate (incomputerate?).

</comment><comment><USER3> At its loosest description, email is a social network and a ton of otherwise computer illiterate people use it daily.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, I'm saying this but I'm not based on any data, it is just my opinion. You will find tons of computer illiterates on Facebook and MySpace. When I say tons I really mean it. Those users, based on my observations, really have a higher ad-click rate but social networks at the same time have a low click rate. When surfing those sites people are usually just "wasting" some time and they know what they are looking for: they wanna know more about life of others...

</comment><comment><USER5> Any picture-only type website doesn't require much from the user. So I Picasa and Flickr and YouTube (and web 1.0's hotornot.com) fall within this category.

It doesn't take much to look at a picture/video and click. Or if they want to submit their own content, it isn't hard to browse, upload and submit.

</comment><comment><USER6> In my experience, when people are becoming computer literate, they get exposed to: Webmail, Search, Wikipedia, Chat Rooms, Online Poker, MySpace, Facebook,

In no particular order.

I think that the mobile web would be a place to make a killing on ads once it's mainstream, no computer required.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think you may need to define computer literacy a little more, but I suspect most users of YouTube and various online gaming forums may qualify.</comment>


Chrome is ready for business - <AUTHOR> http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/12/chrome-is-ready-for-business.html

<comment><USER3> This is a concrete step in taking the fight to Microsoft's turf - <USER2> networks.

Now, all they need to do is allow someone to build a sandboxed IE6 instance inside Chrome so those networks still on IE6 for 'enterprise compatibility' can make the switch too. (of course, I'm jokingly referring to those companies that have critical internal sites, that depend on IE6 and custom plugins and other heresy)

<comment><USER3> Oops; i was wondering why this was such a silent thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2009183> (including a lot of comments)</comment>