Google Update Tanks Traffic - <AUTHOR> https://www.painscience.com/microblog/google-strikes-again.html <comment><USER2> If you depend on SEO for traffic you will go extinct one way or another. Even if you don't get black swaned by an update. SEO is a really an outdated strategy for getting traffic, something that used to be popular in the 2000s when just having a website at all put you on the map. I have seen declining search engine traffic on my sites for years but it has less to do with Google and more to do with the changing culture. Less and less people browse search results and when they do it's more often to glance at the rank-0 result or click an ad. In general SEO being a zero-sum winner-take-all game makes me reluctant to even play when there are alternatives.

The new SEO is optimizing social media. Your visitors and customers are out there, you can talk to them, they can talk to you. You either create a following or pay an influencer to rent their following. In a way this is like going back to the old days of promotion and marketing where you'd go door-to- door to sell. Nowadays the web is saturated and filled with so many scams that word-of-mouth and being associated with a trustworthy face has become important once again.

<comment><USER3> This isn't accurate for a few different reasons...

1\. There will NEVER be a time in which being forced to think about and organize your content to align with customer business objectives will be a bad idea.

2\. If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that traffic to someone else who does.

3\. SEO is not a zero sum game. Just because only one person can take the top spot for a grail keyword, that does not mean longer tailed variants or answer box results are not still valuable at driving tons of relevant traffic.

I'd suggest you take a step back and think more about what users coming to your site, or any site, would need to build trust in a brand instead of telling people to optimize their social media accounts. Followers are a vanity metric. High intent organic traffic is much more effective in the long run at communicating who you are and why someone should trust in your brand.

<comment><USER4> >If you're seeing lower traffic on your site and don't feel like you need to improve the content or do something different, you deserve to be losing that traffic to someone else who does.

I disagree. Suppose you're unquestionably the world expert in some niche field, and you write a site with high-quality, timeless content. It would be really infuriating if some SEO knocked you out of the search results with an adfarm full of SEO gibberish. Or to use a common example, suppose you make a no-nonsense site with some nifty, original cooking recipes. You fall out of the search results because you aren't padding your recipes with pages of irrelevant anecdotes and other filler material. How is that "deserved"?

<comment><USER5> You're missing the point here. Regardless of the causes of the decline, there are invariably things you can do to improve your content or just generally change your approach.

<comment><USER6> Improving your content to optimise for SEO is not the same as improving it for the user. I hope that fact was made bloody obvious by SEO-hugging websites full of garbage occupying top spot of many google searches.

In fact i might google a spesific product, like a Monitor, and the top result will be "but Monitor XYZ on Amazon". When i click on the link, turns out they don't actually sell or stock that product at all!

<comment><USER7> You clicked an ad. Amazon is happy to have paid for you to land there.

<comment><USER6> Please, I not a genius but even I can tell apart an ad from a search result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been an SEO guy since 2006 and I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content.

This helped the small guys thrive as it wasn't just the big guys getting/building links... the little guys were attracting them naturally just by creating unique expert level content.

Today there are so few proxies for naturally occurring "curation" online that Google and others are obviously struggling to identify what content is junk and what is worth surfacing.

As long as links are the main proxy for curation and the average Joe just has a social media account I believe algorithms will continue to silence minority opinions.

A great example of curation in the dev space is awesome lists. If someone could make a collaborative platform for awesome-lists for everything I believe that could be the foundation of a new type of curation powered search engine.

<comment><USER8> Follow up thought here.

There was a huge shift in the mindset of the average webmaster between 2006 and 2012 that preceded the legendary "Penguin" and "Panda" updates.

Running a website went from being a funky, cool thing to do if you were passionate about tech to something you did because you wanted to build a business.

Somewhere in there, people got privy to the value of links (blog comment spam was insane) and people suddenly got a lot more stingy about their links.

This coincided with a massive groundswell of people looking to build "personal brands" in all sorts of spaces and a huge rise in info products by relative experts instead of absolute experts.

Today the absolute experts (or people who are a few steps past a relative experts) are completely drowned out because of their lack of links, lack of domain history/authority, and the general noisiness of the web.

Weird to look back at this because I wasn't innocent in all of this either.

\- I was one of those people who built a personal brand, had 10k people on my email list, and was going to sell an info product.

\- I was one of those SEOs who built huge sites and ranked for all sorts of things simply because I had a stronger domain and knew I could push the smaller guys out.

\- I was one of those guys who stopped linking.

\- I was one of the people who caused this change...

\- How can I be one of the people who undoes it?

\---

The Mozilla news really has me shaken up about the future of the web.

We the people of hacker news are the people who have the power and skills to directly and indirectly shape the future of the internet. What are we going to do with them?

<comment><USER8> Continuing this thread.

My buddy Greg Isenberg constantly is talking about the unbundling of Reddit and honestly he is on to something. [1]

As Reddit continues to unbundle, how can we shape these into curation engines so at least our algos can get some usable data out of communities instead of them being an endless popularity contest.

\---

[1] [https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/the-guide-to- unbundling-...](https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/the-guide-to-unbundling- reddit)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anecdotal, but I run a small business of fairly niche B2B software. Around the end of April/beginning of May our traffic took a nosedive and has been slowly declining ever since (about 33% down now). I kinda got paranoid, so I used the Google Trends and Webmaster tools to decompose and quantify what is going on.

Well, it turns out, the ranking of our site in most major queries hasn't changed. People _are_ genuinely searching less for serious topics. There _is_ definitely an economic slowdown, it just takes a long time to start affecting regular software jobs.

P.S. Ironically, a rather silly side project of mine, that is related to old computer games, had a surge of traffic at the same time. It's like the "work from home" people decided they are better off replaying that classic game or two since the boss isn't watching.

<comment><USER10> The time has come to finally finish Zork!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A botnet is attacking the site in question (domains include xxxcommitted, pornsextube, qastack, thecouponholiday etc)

Around May 2020 the attacks started on your site, see your data: [https://i.imgur.com/mfFRgVj.png](https://i.imgur.com/mfFRgVj.png)

This botnet contains thousands of sites (so far I found this botnet includes 9000+ domains). The same botnet that's attacking my sites and thousands of others companies.

It may well be this is a foreign state cyber attack: so many sites are target and the 9000+ botnet domains to pay aren't free. No doubt this is costing governments lots of money.

When this botnet is attacking your site(s), it's goodbye to your blogging income. Sad but true.

Quality or best results is not the ranking factor anymore, it's large botnets that decide on the Google ranking.

Try Google disavow tool, it barely works, but at least it's something. I hope someday Google will fix this (ignore negative SEO), but for now this is the way things are.

<comment><USER12> > When this botnet is attacking your site(s), it's goodbye to your blogging > income. Sad but true.

Is it because botnet attack makes your site slow, and make it lose google ranking ?

<comment><USER11> It's because the botnet pages themselves contains data which Google considers spam (unrelated topics, link farms, ad pages, porn etc).

Google then lowers the rankings (or removes the blogs from Google). All they have to do is run an update script to update all the domains with the blog link, and Google lowers their rankings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Glitch? Post was Aug 11th matching :

"Google Webmasters @googlewmc · Aug 11 On Monday we detected an issue with our indexing systems that affected Google search results. Once the issue was identified, it was promptly fixed by our Site Reliability Engineers and by now it has been mitigated. Thank you for your patience!"

[https://mobile.twitter.com/googlewmc/status/1293212810474921...](https://mobile.twitter.com/googlewmc/status/1293212810474921985)

Edit: author says no [https://mobile.twitter.com/tomlarkworthy/status/129398818471...](https://mobile.twitter.com/tomlarkworthy/status/1293988184716607488)

</comment><comment><USER14> > POST REMOVED

> With apologies, I have taken this post down: it has attracted a lot more > attention than I expected, and I need to reconsider what I want to say on > this topic.

<comment><USER15> Find the archived version here: [http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painsc...](http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painscience.com/microblog/google- strikes-again.html)

I respect the author in making this bold move of removing this. I would be interested in knowing what the updated views are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't get how companies can blame Google for loss of traffic. Google is going to do what it thinks will produce the best results.

And if you somehow think that gives you a right to show up in those results or be there if you benefited from showing up in results in the past, that's flawed thinking.

<comment><USER17> Did you read the article?

<comment><USER18> > _Please don 't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even > read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article > mentions that."_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Web content makers have to realize their days of monetizing are numbered. Free web content is free food for NLP algorithms , which have already become impressive. In one of the next Google updates, they will eliminate web results compeltely and just give you the predicted answers. We're bound to see original content trying to hide themselves from google in order to remain relevant.

<comment><USER20> Except nobody wants to click on something produced by an NLP algorithm.

I don't doubt people will do that as they have every other shady SEO technique, but Google will continue to fight it as spam.

At the end of the day I think quality content is still king and the only viable long-term SEO strategy.

<comment><USER21> Aren't Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant etc all providing answers generated by NLP algorithms? People seem to be using them pretty frequently.

Google already provides no-click search answers by scraping data from a website and bolding a paragraph that may answer your question. The branding of the original site is removed on these snippets.

How long before Google decides not to link out the website altogether?

<comment><USER20> I don't use those products, they only work for very specific types of queries. While I expect they will make it more broadly useful, I don't see it replacing content sites altogether.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Please please please let it fix the way searching for recipes turns up the most awful, painful drivel at the top of the rankings.

<comment><USER23> How many of those narrative travesties are serving Google ads every other paragraph?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It seems pretty clear to me why you lost traffic here...

Your content isn't organized. I get to the site and I have no idea what to click on or how to find something that actually applies to me as someone looking for pain advice.

You have way too many internal links on these pages. Focus.

The content is all a wall of text with unclear headlines and sections that break up the content.

When you compare this to another site like healthline.com or draxe.com you can see the disparity.

Seems like you have done nothing to optimize the mobile experience, which is where id assume most traffic comes from seeing as they recently searched to a mobile first index.

Last but not least - what is 'Pains' and why is it the first link in the nav?

</comment><comment><USER24> This article no longer has any content: "POST REMOVED"

<comment><USER24> wayback link [https://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.pains...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painscience.com/microblog/google- strikes-again.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The bit soliciting people to link to the site is not only desperate SEO -- the author claims they're moving away from relying upon Google, when actually they're trying to double down, seriously asking for "high-quality, earnest links from highly ranked domains" \-- it will yield very close to zero natural click through.

People are fairly impatient and when searching for something often hope for an _answer_ as quickly as possible. This site seems heavily narrative based, with a number of paragraphs of content per point. I imagine that the median dwell time on the site is poor as a lot of people hit the back button to the SERP and just go to another page that cuts to the chase. Like the Physioplus page that this author mocks, which seems much clearer and succint.

We know that Google is constantly measuring and judging based upon that -- dwell time is king, and while SEO and desperate link solicitations might get you in contention, if the dwell time isn't there you will _rightly_ get punted from the results. I doubt many care whether alternatives were written by a "high school dropout" if they get to the core of their need, which is usually developing the proper heuristics to know what they're dealing with.

</comment><comment><USER26> Years ago a Google engineer on HN infamously said something to the effect of "Google considers SEO / free traffic a BUG" \- somebody have that link handy?

<comment><USER27> Of course Google considers SEO a bug. The entire point of SEO is tricking google into thinking a page should be the top result. Google's goal isn't to always show the page with the best SEO, it's to show the page the searcher is searching for. Google has been in a continuous battle to stop SEO since it's inception.

<comment><USER28> > The entire point of SEO is tricking google into thinking a page should be > the top result.

Many SEO professionals help businesses by writing the content people search for. Their goal is not to trick Google, but to write content that deserves the top spot. A mattress retailer may not have the first clue how to write content that is useful to people who want to buy mattresses, but SEOs and professional writers can do it for them.

Additionally, Mr. Mattress Retailer has no idea about the technical aspects of content that help Google to understand it: site navigation, meta data, schema data, and so on. Technical SEOs can help them out. The result is content that's relevant to the right audience, informative, and published with all the extra stuff that helps Google to make sense of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Author removed the post, so:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painsc...](http://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painscience.com/microblog/google- strikes-again.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> [https://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.pains...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200813190612/https://www.painscience.com/microblog/google- strikes-again.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> When will people learn? From the article:

"partly my fault for building my business around organic search and failing to diversify over the years"

Build real businesses, solve real business problems and stop depending on search engine SEO niche sites. One way or another either the competition eats you and write all your content with more links or search engine drops you or blacklist you then you are dead.

This is NOT a good business model and should never be the main source of income.

<comment><USER32> What's the alternative for content like this?

<comment><USER33> A newsletter format perhaps, meant to eventually make the website merely a side bonus. Depending on how they're done, newsletters can be wildly lucrative, far more so than a site like PainScience.

I scanned his site, I see no newsletter. I think that's an extraordinary mistake, to not have been leveraging all that free Google traffic all those years to build up something like that. You use the free Google traffic to make Google unnecessary to your business, that should always be your focus (of what to utilize the Google traffic for) while the freebie traffic is still flowing.

100% this guy would have been better off building a wholly independent newsletter type service that had zero dependence on Google and could be built out via other means (once it's cash flowing you can legitimately advertise it to build subscribers up, it becomes free-standing and self-building as a real business, Google is almost entirely cut out of the situation then, and anything you get from Google traffic is a bonus). The beauty of a newsletter, again if it's applicable to what you're doing, is it's a free agent, you're not going to be dependent on a singular traffic source, you can take advantage of all of them without much fear of losing your business because one traffic source vanishes.

He still has some search traffic, I'd put all of my effort into building a newsletter on the back of what's left, there might still be time to unlock from Google this way while using Google's remaining search traffic to kick free.

As a bonus he can also still sell/promo his books via a newsletter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> These people who think Google owes them something for free...

</comment><comment><USER35> They took the post down. I'd say either delete the thread or change the URL to an archived link

</comment><comment><USER36> This was posted by me earlier here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24115881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24115881)

<comment><USER37> No, this is a link to a different post about the same change/glitch, not the same article. Is this a weak attempt to drive people to your blog?

<comment><USER36> not my blog :) This was the first source and wanted to share</comment></comment></comment>


Major DoS vulnerability being announced tomorrow - <AUTHOR> http://events.ccc.de/2011/12/28/crypto-talk-at-28c3-effective-denial-of-service-attacks-against-web-application-platforms-day-2-1400-saal-1/

<comment><USER2> Just started, live stream at saal1.h264.28c3.fem-net.de

<comment><USER2> <https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23hashdos>

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> prerelease of the recording: <http://www.youtube.com/28c3#p/u/2/_EEhviEO1Vo>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For more info see this post on the jRuby site: <http://www.jruby.org/2011/12/27/jruby-1-6-5-1>

In summary, this is an attack being announced at 28C3 tomorrow. It affects most major platforms, including Ruby, PHP, Java, and ASP.net and possibly including others.

This is the CERT advisory, although its 403ing at the moment. <http://www.ocert.org/advisories/ocert-2011-003.html>

The two security researchers are Julian Wälde (@zeri42) and Alexander Klink(@alech).</comment>


Facebook account locked after "unlocking" Timeline? - <AUTHOR>

There was a link that floated around, still is (I wont repost it, easy to find but in case this is valid I don't want anyone else to get their account locked) on how to "unlock" the Facebook Timeline early, by creating a fake developer account.  I did this yesterday.<p>Today, I logged in and suddenly I notice I have to relog in, I login and my account is locked (just had to answer security questions).  Did this happen to anyone else? <comment><USER2> I never thought I'd want to post a facepalm picture on HN.

</comment><comment><USER3> This happens every time they declare an app as fraudulent.</comment>


Daily iPhone App Sales Figures: iLightning - <AUTHOR> http://www.shinyfish.com/ilightning/sales/

<comment><USER2> 53 sales so far at £0.59 ...

not a terrible return, looks like it took an hour or two of development time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing really takes 1 hour to develop, test, tune, and release.

It's true, though, that the submission process took longer than development.</comment></comment>


Dating Site Completed... sigh - <AUTHOR> http://www.blue74.com/2010/11/start-up-advice/another-dating-site-sigh/

<comment><USER2> Obviously, there are lots of reasons why one should fold on a startup, but I'm not sure that the reasons this person gives are that good.

1\. completion is usually a goal in itself. You _can't_ succeed with this step, regardless of whether you _do_ succeed after it's complete.

2\. The author seems to have simply accepted that there is no room in the market for this site. It's not clear that that's true. There may be niche- markets to pursue, or there may be the standard 'better implementation' options.

3\. Giving up before releasing, but grinding out the last bit of code seems unlikely to result in a great product. From an armchair psychologist perspective, it smacks of 'giving up before you can get beaten'.

Kudos to the author for sharing the site, regardless of their low opinion of it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations for sticking through and finishing!

In the future, however, I would recommend that you use something more like agile or Steve Blank principles. That way you don't end up half way through something, with a big amount of time sunk into it, and have to finish a product you're not excited about. Those processes are good for allowing you to pause, research what you're doing (and measure how people interact with it), and pivot.

That said, here's the silver lining: you successfully designed and built a product in a very difficult market. That's no small feat. Be proud of what you've done, even if you don't think it's up to your personal standards.</comment>


Lumo – A fast, standalone ClojureScript REPL that runs on Node.js and V8 - <AUTHOR> https://anmonteiro.com/2016/11/the-fastest-clojure-repl-in-the-world/ <comment><USER3> Sometimes I think Clojure should have been developed on top of the ErlangVM instead of the JVM. I think that the ErlangVM solves a lot better the problems that Clojure is trying to solve. Also, seems like targeting the ErlangVM is an achievable feat, since Elixir in its version 1.3 has proven to be extremely solid.

Crazy idea: if I wanted to implement Clojure on top of the ErlangVM, where should I start?

<comment><USER4> I think shared memory is foundational to Clojure's approach to concurrency, and that is something the Erlang VM cannot provide. So some main fixtures of Clojure's standard library, like atoms, STM, agents, become either useless or nonsensical.

It's also not clear to me wether the Erlang VM provides what Clojure needs to efficiently implement its user-defined types, protocols, etc

That said, a Clojure-like dialect of lisp built on Erlang is a fine idea and, as others have said, I would probably start by seeing how the Lisp-Flavoured- Erlang (LFE) guys built _their_ lisp.

<comment><USER5> Mnesia is sorta like STM in Erlang.

<comment><USER6> Actually no, it is completely different internally with different properties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The startup time is of course very low, so that's good.

I think you're underselling the tool for beginners like myself - it's not just a ClojureScript REPL, it's actually an executable which can run node.js scripts written in clojurescript.

For example, here's the typical node http server example: [https://gist.github.com/anonymous/c14b2b57184c650d9f3ff0a9e1...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/c14b2b57184c650d9f3ff0a9e1a84058)

You can run it with lumo test.cljs

<comment><USER8> How do I add Clojurescript libraries to my script? Doesn't that require a lein/boot cljs project?

<comment><USER9> Lumo, just like Planck, implements classpath emulation. You can specify colon separated paths to JARs/dirs in which Lumo will resolve requires. Take a look at `lumo -h` for all the available options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Neat project, but back when I was using Clojure a lot, I lived in Emacs and the time spent for booting up my interactive environment was OK because once booted up, I would work for a long time without restarting from scratch. Same for me now with Emacs+Intero for interactive Haskell development - <USER2> everything is loaded, Everything is fast.

This project seems more suited to being able to write fast starting scripts in Clojurscript.

<comment><USER11> Came here to say exactly this. The use case is very limited, although technically it's something that will push the state of the art forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Author here. Happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER12> Any canche to see ARM binaries pre built? Would love to run this on raspberry pi / pocket chip. Also planck had io support. Are you planning to add support for io in idiomatic clojure to your project?

<comment><USER9> Why not?! Sounds like a great idea. Happy to see someone help me with that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been using Planck (and Replete for iOS) when I need a fast-starting clj[s] REPL for checking things quickly. What would be the use case for Lumo for me?

<comment><USER9> The difference is that both Planck and Replete run on JavascriptCore, while Lumo runs on Node.js and V8. One of the advantages of piggybacking on Node is that we get access to its whole ecosystem for free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This would be cool for ClojureScript scripting

</comment><comment><USER15> Really hope one day we can build ClojureScript projects without JVM. Lumo is one more step further than Planck.

</comment><comment><USER16> I totally though this was about the WebGL tile rendering library: [https://github.com/kbirk/lumo](https://github.com/kbirk/lumo)

I was like "Clojure... V8, what?!"

</comment><comment><USER17> any chance of a npm/yarn package ?

<comment><USER9> Happy to consider it, but I'm unsure what the benefits would be? Probably something like Homebrew would be more suitable I believe.

<comment><USER17> With all due respect we are on Linux. No homebrew for us. Since you are already on the node platform..this makes sense for all of us.

<comment><AUTHOR> Erm. No. I'd pay not to use npm at all.

<comment><USER13> Why? You can use it not at all for free!

<comment><AUTHOR> Because the whole npm system is broken, and I wish yarn would break apart and start anew.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> s/Clojure/ClojureScript

<comment><USER19> I was confused as well. The article compares the standard Clojure REPL with two ClojureScript REPLs (one being the one introduced in the article).

Interesting nevertheless, but still confusing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Please change the title to ClojureScript, not Clojure.

</comment><comment><USER21> 'fastest starting Clojure REPL'... which is still slow compared to alternatives.

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately, Node.js and V8 seem to be about 2.5X slower than JavaScriptCore for bootstrapped ClojureScript. I haven't found a way around it. I also don't mean to trick anyone and this is explained in the post.

<comment><USER21> To me 'fast' means more than startup time. The headline is just clickbait.

The time you are reporting is also not that 'fast'. Other tools start in a fraction of that time.

<comment><USER22> sbcl isn't Clojure, is it? Or am I mistaken? I don't see the article or its title comparing it to repls in general.

Edit: original comment mentioned sbcl and included sbcl repl start-up time.

<comment><USER21> Better title would be:

'less slowest starting Clojure REPL of three'

Mentioning 'fastest' at a time of 3GHZ multicore machines with SSD and a duration of 0.1 seconds is just absurd. That's >100 million instructions just to start a language prompt and evaluating a symbol to itself. The Java version is even more absurd with around 1 billion instructions just to get a REPL...

A shell on a 1 MIPS DEC VAX 11/780 started faster, while the machine had a hundred users.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Eric Schmidt on How to Build a Better Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/07/opinion/eric-schmidt-on-how-to-build-a-better-web.html <comment><USER2> Like 'spell checkers' for bad thoughts? Who decides what's misspelled?</comment>


5 Tips for System Design Interviews - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/CtmBGH8MkX4 <comment><AUTHOR> Gaurav Sen's series([https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMCXHnjXnTnvo6alSjVkg...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMCXHnjXnTnvo6alSjVkgxV- VH6EPyvoX)) explains key areas in System design.</comment>


Google adds collaboration support to Microsoft Office - <AUTHOR> http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2011/02/google-cloud-connect-for-microsoft.html

<comment><USER2> Congratulations DocVerse! What an awesome group of people.

For those who don't know them, Google acquired them last year presumably to build exactly this.

From my experience, integrating with MS Office/Outlook APIs is no walk in the park, so syncing with Docs is friggin' amazing.

<comment><USER3> Ahh, I was wondering what was powering that. Thought it might have been an evolution of the etherpad stack.

Oh how I miss etherpad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Many of you have also asked about availability for Macs. Unfortunately due to the lack of support for open APIs on Microsoft Office for Mac, we are unable to make Google Cloud Connect available on Macs at this time. We look forward to when that time comes so we can provide this feature to our Mac customers as well._

In case all you want is to access your documents as files: <http://code.google.com/p/google-docs-fs/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Uh oh, app takeover. I don't know how Microsoft is going to react to Google adding a crucially missing feature in Office and leveraging its software for its own purposes.

<comment><USER6> Maybe this will motivate them to get their rears in gear. The fact that they've had SkyDrive and various sync/mesh technologies, yet haven't done this is downright embarrassing.

I suspect MS thought they could do this in the enterprise via SharePoint first. I think now they'll have to change their plans.

<comment><USER7> Er? I thought they already did add sync with SkyDrive and co-authoring (at least in Word and Powerpoint) in 2010?

<comment><USER6> They have syncing with SkyDrive. But no co-authoring that I know of. Link?

<comment><USER7> [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mvpawardprogram/archive/2010/12/20/m...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mvpawardprogram/archive/2010/12/20/mvps- for-office-and-sharepoint-2010-work-without-the-wait.aspx)

"Microsoft Office 2010 enables technology known as co-authoring, which gives you the ability to edit the same file at the same time as people in other locations. No more waiting in line to get your work done, no more getting locked out of your files, and more options for real-time collaboration with your team. What applications enable co-authoring? You can use co-authoring in the Office 2010 versions of Word and PowerPoint. Co-authoring via shared notebooks is also available in Microsoft OneNote 2010. And, simultaneous editing is also available in Microsoft Excel Web App and OneNote Web App."

Although it looks like there are kinda weird limitations on it, in that apparently Word and PowerPoint co-authoring only work in the desktop apps (and not in the web apps, but you have to save to SkyDrive), Excel co-authoring only works in the web app (and not in the desktop app), and OneNote is the only one that works in both the web app and desktop app.

<comment><USER6> Thanks. The UI for this is not very obvious. Had I known this with Word I would have used it for a while now. I'll have to try it now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does this functionality compare to the upcoming Office 365?

</comment><comment><USER9> I think dropbox it's not going to be acquired by google...</comment>


Why we rolled our own consensus algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://www.quorumcontrol.com/blog/2018/11/13/why-we-rolled-out-our-own-consensus-algorithm <comment><USER3> Not rolling your own consensus algorithm is approx. rules zero through ten of distributed systems programming. Nothing on this page provides any positive signal indicating unique (or even average) competence to the task. To wit,

> We are borrowing all the best parts of existing technology and combining > them in a unique and innovative way.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the listed existing technologies have been formally verified.

<comment><USER4> This seems like a really, really bad idea.

However, if everyone had that attitude we'd never improve on the existing art. So I'm glad some people are willing to risk it.

But just to reiterate, if you're thinking of rolling your own consensus - <USER2> even implementing an existing consensus algorithm yourself (although that's much worse for Paxos than for Raft) - you're almost certainly making a big mistake.

<comment><USER5> Just to drive it home.

Those who actually make their own encryption libraries know their stuff, and have been in the space for years.

You should never, ever, roll your own encryption.

If it's a requirement, then change your damn requirements, because just like consensus; it is not easy to get right, and the pros make mistakes.

<comment><USER6> Consensus is not crypto, it's ridiculously trivial in comparison and usually so useless, that nobody even bothers doing it correctly all the way to the end user.

<comment><USER3> Consensus is at least as hard as crypto.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The best feedback you ever get as a library maintainer is the population count of questions.

If everyone asks you the same question, you're the one who's wrong, not everyone else.

If everyone is asking you why you did it, you probably shouldn't have done it.

</comment><comment><USER8> This sounds like a terrible idea. Similarly to implementing your own encryption, having a custom consensus algorithm can create additional vulnerabilities -- a custom consensus algorithm isn't as tested and vetted as an existing, widely-used one.

In security, you generally don't want "unique and innovative", you want tested, verified, robust algorithms that have been gone over with a fine- toothed comb.

</comment><comment><USER9> Any formal verification of you Algo ? Consensus algos are hard to implement correctly.

<comment><USER10> We're planning on formally verifying the algorithm once it stabilizes.

<comment><USER11> So... what was the purpose of me reading this non-announcement again?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there a TLA+ spec available?

<comment><USER10> We are still vetting and improving the consensus algorithm, but we're planning on publishing a full TLA+ spec once the algorithm stabilizes.

<comment><USER12> Wouldn't it be easier to start with TLA+ / PlusCal? It offers higher level of abstraction and helps catch specification bugs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thought this would be a link to a white-paper...

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey pkulak- you can access the whitepaper through this channel: [https://www.quorumcontrol.com/documentation/](https://www.quorumcontrol.com/documentation/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> because your ws is called quorum control ?

</comment><comment><USER11> TL;DR: This is an announcement that they didn't actually do anything yet. (algorithm not yet fully decided on, just buzzword soup).

<comment><USER15> I believe Quorum is the Ethereum variant that JP Morgan developed in-house and considered "spinning off" to the community, i.e. abandoned but on github. Not clear if JPM are still paying devs to work on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A: Because we don't have a lot of experience in distributed systems.</comment>


Show HN: The (free) Express.js Handbook - <AUTHOR> https://flaviocopes.com/the-express-handbook/ <comment><USER2> Looks interesting, thanks! Although after downloading all the available formats (PDF, ePub, and MOBI), each one shows that several chapters as unavailable, remarking that they are available "only in ebook."

Namely,

* Manage Cookies

* Work with HTTP Headers

* Redirects

* CORS

* Middleware

* Handling Forms

* File uploads in forms

* Setup Let's Encrypt for Express

Maybe I misunderstood, but is there another book that includes those chapters?

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course I forgot to update the Dropbox files prior to posting :)

You can get the updated version from the same link, sorry!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's not really free if you are making me give you my email address.

<comment><USER4> Sure it is. You're the one choosing to give them _your_ email address when you can just as easily give them a disposable email address with no value, so you're _choosing_ to pay for something that's free.</comment></comment>


Rube Goldberg Exercise Bike is also a back-scratcher, fan, and cookie dispenser - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/a-retired-engineers-latest-sculpture-is-a-bicycle-back-scratcher-and-cookie-dispenser--all-in-one/2020/08/26/b4c1dcb6-e3f3-11ea-8181-606e603bb1c4_story.html <comment><AUTHOR> [https://archive.vn/M1LQB](https://archive.vn/M1LQB)</comment>


ProtonMail Statement about the DDOS Attack - <AUTHOR> https://protonmaildotcom.wordpress.com/2015/11/05/protonmail-statement-about-the-ddos-attack/ <comment><USER2> I want to emphasise this sentence:

"This means that ProtonMail is likely under attack by two separate groups, with the second attackers exhibiting capabilities more commonly possessed by state-sponsored actors."

<comment><USER3> The initial attackers transferred back a small amount of btc to Protonmail to communicate that "somebody with great power" had come in for the kill after them: [https://blockchain.info/tx/7fca8fb2ee6d0bee0544fa8b9653ecd17...](https://blockchain.info/tx/7fca8fb2ee6d0bee0544fa8b9653ecd1798e8a3402ec64906d9fe9f3c2deead7)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unbelievable that they actually handed over $6000 to those criminals. No wonder they didn't stop the attack, they probably thought they could get more!

<comment><USER5> "This coordinated assault on key infrastructure eventually managed to bring down both the datacenter and the ISP, which impacted hundreds of other companies, not just ProtonMail.

At this point, we were placed under a lot of pressure by third parties to just pay the ransom, which we grudgingly agreed to do at 3:30PM Geneva time to the bitcoin address 1FxHcZzW3z9NRSUnQ9Pcp58ddYaSuN1T2y. We hoped that by paying, we could spare the other companies impacted by the attack against us, but the attacks continued nevertheless."

I understand the reasons but I'd prefer to not have access to my mail for a day than to give into these criminals. That said the damage probably easily exceeds $6000, I can understand other companies trying to pressure Protonmail.

<comment><USER6> Isn't the ISP/carrier ultimately responsible for mitigating these types of attacks? You rent a line and some IP addresses, not the garbage coming into their network.

I'd be interested to hear how Matthew Prince at Cloudflare would mitigate these NTP/SSDP amplification attacks.

While I agree they are a juicy target for nation states, without proof that claim rings hallow. Why would the NSA/Russians/Chinese want $6000 from Protonmail when all they'd have to do is use XKEYSCORE to filter out Protonmail users and hack computers to get the secret E-mail at layer 7. Shutting down the Protonmail doesn't help a nation state at all. They WANT to know who's sending/receiving encrypted E-mail. The second wave of the attack would be as simple as targeting the last few hops to protonmail. That's not rocket science. If extortion was the goal of a nation state, we'd all be broke.

This attack smells more of a sophisticated asshole blackhat haxor with some advanced tools and a knowledge of vulnerabilities in critical internet protocols.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Resources for Learning CSS - <AUTHOR>

I know the basics of css but have difficulty with more advanced things, like positioning things on the page just so. Does anyone know a good resource for learning? <comment><USER2> <http://learnlayout.com> for positioning/layout

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.codecademy.com/> has some nice lessons in CSS, including positioning.

</comment><comment><USER4> _A Practical Guide to HMTL & CSS_

<http://learn.shayhowe.com/>

I would suggest reviewing the beginner guide and then moving onto the advanced guide.

</comment><comment><USER5> For reference, among others:

<http://htmldog.com/>

<http://www.cssdog.com/css_intro.html>

</comment><comment><USER2> Almost forgot <http://www.w3schools.com/css/>

<comment><USER6> [http://www.w3fools.com](http://www.w3fools.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> OP - I'd be willing to do lessons if we can work it out properly. Check out <http://css-tricks.com/category/beginner/></comment>


Emergence of Polymorphic Mating Strategies in Robot Colonies - <AUTHOR> http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0093622

<comment><AUTHOR> "To our knowledge, our study is the first to demonstrate the emergence of polymorphic evolutionarily stable strategies within a robot evolution framework"</comment>


Major Mode for Reading EPUBs in Emacs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/wasamasa/nov.el <comment><USER3> That's a pity the FB2 format is not nearly as popular as EPUB is. It's a single-file pure tidy (I mean a simple, intuitive, bloat-free, well-documented schema) XML with purely semantic layout and no formatting. It's a pleasure to write code processing it. The user/app/device is the only to decide how to view it (neither pages nor fonts are specified). Isn't this lovely?

<comment><USER4> EPUB's zip archive may encapsulate images and fonts. How do you achieve that with a single XML file? I guess it has a reduced feature set?

<comment><USER5> I wrote and use an editor similar to Scrivener that allows the user to edit in Markdown, but saves the project as XML. Images are saved as nodes with a mimetype and a Base64-encoded byte array, and referenced in the document with a UUID.

HTML also allows you to specify an image inline using Base64 encoding; soemthing like

        <img src="data:image/png;base64, fhfhfhfh...">

I don't know what FB2 does, but it's definitely a solvable problem.

<comment><USER6> Reading the wikipedia article[1] this is exactly what it does.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FictionBook#Differences_from_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FictionBook#Differences_from_other_ebook_formats)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Shameless plug for a personal project:

[https://github.com/ashton314/homebrew- mm](https://github.com/ashton314/homebrew-mm)

This is really just a one-liner I put in a shell script to pass things to Pandoc so I could read them like a man page in my terminal.

Love the Emacs lib though. The more emacs I my life the better. :)

<comment><USER8> A screenshot would be great. I'm not sure what the output would look like and therefore if it's something worth trying. Though as you say it's only a one liner...

<comment><USER7> Great advice! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is really clean. Ugly option for for non-emacs plebs like me:

unzip -qc "$1" " _._ htm*" | w3m -T text/html -dump -cols 120

<comment><USER10> The UNIX way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://github.com/bddean/emacs-ereader](https://github.com/bddean/emacs- ereader) is another one. Similar features, the biggest difference is that nov shows a chapter at a time while ereader renders the entire document at once which allows doing isearch over the whole thing.

Both of these take advantage of the shr HTML renderer built into Emacs which in turn uses libxml2 to do the heavy lifting.

<comment><USER12> From the screenshot, my one big complaint is that it's typeset ragged right instead of flush right (which is, generally, how books and most ebook readers do it), but I suppose that's just a CSS fix, then?

<comment><USER13> If you scroll down, the README tells you how to make it flush right: [https://github.com/wasamasa/nov.el#rendering](https://github.com/wasamasa/nov.el#rendering)

<comment><USER12> Ah, excellent :) that looks much nicer!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nov is my primary ereader these days, particularly since the read-aloud package compliments it so well. If I had one complaint, it's that I wish it supported concatenating all chapters of a book into one single buffer.

</comment><comment><USER15> I really like that this by default remembers your place in the book. Between Nov.el, pdf-tools, pdf-view-restore, and the fact that most non pdf files convert pretty easily to epub I think one can now use emacs as reading software pretty easily and with far less effort.

The bindings are even similar save for o for outline in pdf-tools and t for table of contents.

One suggestion would be a function to search the entire document since in buffer search will only search the current chapter.

Really awesome progress.

</comment><comment><USER16> Now, if only I could get Emacs running on my iPad mini which is my primary e-reader.

<comment><USER17> It runs fine in ish.app

<comment><USER18> I can't find ish.app in the iOS store. Please post publisher and further details.

<comment><USER19> Looks like it's [https://ish.app](https://ish.app)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think you can also do that using DocView[0] and the mupdf backend.

[0]: [https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Do...](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Document- View.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> "Keybinds can be viewed with F1-m". This information should be in the first chapter of README. :-/

<comment><USER22> F1-m translates to "C-h m", which is the standard Emacs command to show information about the current major-mode. It's not specific to nov.el.

<comment><USER21> I did not know that. And I have been using Emacs since 1984. I use "M-X apropos".

<comment><USER23> C-h ? will show you help on help, among them:

C-h a - <USER2>

C-h k <key sequence> \- detailed docs on the command run by key sequence

C-h m - docs on current minor modes and major mode

C-h w <command> \- what keystrokes will run command

There's a lot more as well.

<comment><USER21> C-h is backspace and also "move cursor left" on many ancient video terminals. So it was always remapped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've been heads down looking at implementing EPUB for Polar and there's no way this could work reliably in Emacs. If so I'd be very very very impressed if Emacs could pull it off but I'd bet money that it can't.

I think a good 80% of them could work but you don't want to be halfway done an EPUB only to find out that code highlights weren't being rendered or that rending is halfway broken for some small percentage of the document.

</comment><comment><USER25> From where do you guys purchase or download (free) EPUBS? I wanted Christensen books and didn't find any. Either they are tied to Kindle or Noob.

<comment><USER15> From the same people that run sci hub. Please remember that authors need to eat too though. If you have money you should support them by buying their books or they may write fewer of them for you to enjoy.

<comment><USER26> This doesn't excuse DRM. Personally I don't read ebooks because (1) I won't accept DRM, (2) I won't pirate. Instead I buy a few books in dead tree format but mainly lots of authors are losing out.

<comment><USER15> You could buy the dead tree and pirate the ebook supporting the author but not drm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It would be nice to have an interface to calibre search of your ebook metadata. This can be done by wrapping calibredb.

Example use case. Run M-x calibre-search , prompt appears type title:space tags:scifi search is populated with the titles and metadata of matching books and you type to narrow hit enter book opens.

Also open-last-book and open-recent-books. I could probably add this to my existing wrapper.

<comment><USER27> My solution to this has been to export the library as a bibtex file, which is a built in feature of Calibre, and then use ivy-bibtex (could just as easily use helm-bibtex) to search the library. You need to make sure the file path is part of your bibtex export, but this is easily done. Also make sure you export tags.

<comment><USER15> Sounds kind of manual compared to what I do now which is wrap calibredb in a script and narrow if needed via rofi.

[https://github.com/davatorium/rofi](https://github.com/davatorium/rofi)

Presumably would be about as easy to do in elisp.

A call to calibredb in a library of thousands of books on ssd is only 1/3 -> 1/2 a second

<comment><USER27> It is a little more manual, but I think the end result is a little faster during use. This half second delay you mention doesn't happen with my library of over a thousand books. If I had something more automatic, I'd still want to be able to use bibtex. I like having the same interface for reading and citing, as well as the same for both reading books and reading papers.

I bet there is a command line way to export a bibtex library, so it could be automated in elisp. It takes seconds though, and I only do it a few times a month. Doesn't matter though, I settled on this workflow because I was already using bibtex regularly for papers. Probably makes less sense if you aren't already happy with bibtex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone know of a tool like pdf-tools but for annotating epub?

Ideally I have an epub that I read on my kobo ereader. Afterwards I have a number of annotations (highlights) that I have listed in plain text.

I would like to be have the epub and the highlights side by side and be able to snap directly to the highlights position within the epub in order to take further notes.

<comment><USER29> For annotating, you can try org-noter:

[https://github.com/weirdNox/org-noter](https://github.com/weirdNox/org-noter)

If you want to get your annotations into org mode/emacs, look at this guy's work:

[https://beepb00p.xyz/orger.html](https://beepb00p.xyz/orger.html)

I haven't yet tried it, but I think he does something similar.

</comment></comment><comment> ____Sash---701_ This goes well with doom - [https://github.com/hlissner/doom- emacs](https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs)

</comment><comment><USER30> What's this read aloud package ?

<comment><USER14> [https://github.com/gromnitsky/read- aloud.el](https://github.com/gromnitsky/read-aloud.el)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This works quite well.</comment>


Ask PG: Do you review rejected YC apps to find startups who then made it big? - <AUTHOR> Just wondering. <comment><USER2> Whenever a startup we rejected seems to be succeeding, we go back and try to figure out why we rejected them. Occasionally we change the application process as a result.

We don't start from the applications though. We hear from news stories when startups are doing well, and then we go back and look at their application.

<comment><USER3> You're going to miss startups that might have succeeded if you had invested this way. You take a percentage of the companies you invest in because you make it more likely for them to succeed.

Given the funnel of startup failure, there are probably more startups that didn't succeed because you passed than startups that succeed despite your passing.

<comment><USER4> But what metric can track might-have-beens?

<comment><USER3> My point is that only looking at those that are successful is missing most of the data on people they should have funded. Assessing this is really hard, but they shouldn't fool themselves into thinking they have all the data.

<comment><USER5> Your insight is correct, but doesn't seem to be actionable in any way.

<comment><USER3> Yes it is: reflect on the interview process, not just on the rejected eventual successes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Answering as if your question said "And does that make you want to change your application process", because the first time I read it I thought it did.

My understanding of the essays I've read is that there wouldn't be much point in it. Ideas evolve or change entirely, and more importantly people improve. If the gut feeling was no then, all you know is that something changed.

<comment><USER7> _all you know is that something changed._

Or you missed something that was already there - IMO more likely, considering how little you can learn about someone from the application, and that the founders at least had the potential to become what they are today.

<comment><USER8> I disagree, founders and products change, and can make the difference between lifestyle and $1B. Having had multiple rejections for years from different sources (then accepted with the same idea), I know this to be true. It's less about having a "great idea" and more about having the vision and ability to execute on it - that's what needs to be proven.

<comment><USER7> Sorry if it wasn't clear. My comment was purely about the founders, not about the idea since I know they put so much more weight on the first than on the latter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Based on a question answered by PG on Askolo, YCombinator track them[1]:

 _Q: Have there been any startups you 've later regretted rejecting from YCombinator? A: Sure, several. But I can't name names because it's not for me to disclose that they applied._

Additionally they also mention about contacting them on rejected applications[2]:

 _" If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes"_

Here are some that are known to have been rejected by YC and have gone onto raise funding (which is not a perfect metric by any means since funding ≠ success) or have been acquired:

\- SendGrid - [http://sendgrid.com/](http://sendgrid.com/) \- Raised $27.4M[3]

\- CouchOne - [http://www.couchbase.com/](http://www.couchbase.com/) \- Raised $56M[4]

\- AfterTheDeadline - [http://afterthedeadline.com/](http://afterthedeadline.com/) \- Acquired By Automattic

\- LightSail Energy - [http://lightsailenergy.com/](http://lightsailenergy.com/) \- Raised $42.8M[5]

\- SignPost - [http://www.signpost.com/](http://www.signpost.com/) \- Raised $15M[6]

\- Storenvy - [http://www.storenvy.com](http://www.storenvy.com) \- although they were kicked out of YC[7] Raised $6.5M [8]

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20120814111130/http://askolo.com...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120814111130/http://askolo.com/pg)

[2] [http://ycuniverse.com/yc-applying-interviewees](http://ycuniverse.com/yc- applying-interviewees)

[3] [http://www.crunchbase.com/company/sendgrid](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/sendgrid)

[4] [http://www.crunchbase.com/company/couchbase](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/couchbase)

[5] [http://www.crunchbase.com/company/lightsail- energy](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/lightsail-energy)

[6] [http://www.crunchbase.com/company/signpost](http://www.crunchbase.com/company/signpost)

[7] [http://joncrawford.com/post/20378314843/how-i-got-kicked- out...](http://joncrawford.com/post/20378314843/how-i-got-kicked-out-of-y- combinator-and-then-raised)

[8] [http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/12/storenvy-goes-from- getting-...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/12/storenvy-goes-from-getting- kicked-out-of-yc-to-raising-a-5m-round/)

<comment><USER10> Here's another one: Buffer

[https://www.quora.com/Y-Combinator/Whats-it-like-to-get- reje...](https://www.quora.com/Y-Combinator/Whats-it-like-to-get-rejected-by- Y-Combinator)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yes. This has been mentioned by PG numerous times in numerous places.

</comment><comment><USER12> Useful context> [http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar- club/](http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/)

Edit: with older data included> [http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/unicorn-...](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/unicorn- graph1c.png)

</comment><comment><USER13> It would be a difficult study... How many YC companies would have failed if they had not been accepted to YC? Certainly, a number of rejected companies who later failed may have thrived under YC.

</comment><comment><USER14> Presumably, if they were to 'make it big' he would probably hear about this through other channels without having to constantly monitor a large pool of rejected applicants.

<comment><USER15> Sure he would hear about it, but would he remember that they had applied.

Presumably, someone on the YC staff monitors the success of companies both in the program and out of the program and uses that data to improve future acceptance decisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why so much 'Ask PG' lately when he never replies, let alone read them?

<comment> daniel-cussen Seriously. I guess for him these kinds of posts have, overall, low signal vs. noise.

<comment><USER17> He has answered this question so many times in so many places. In fact, he mentions the fact that YC tracks the companies they reject quite often -- including here on HN and in essays. Given that, I find it likely he has read the comment but find it unlikely he'd take the time to respond since it's so obviously asked by someone who isn't paying enough attention to even do ten minutes of research on their own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm starting to think "Ask PG" are linkbait titles disguised as "Ask HN".

</comment><comment><USER19> what a stupid ask. why wouldn't a vc do this? Isn't this something that would be a big part of the iterative application process. I doubt the process has remained unchanged over the years. As new feature vectors of success are identified it would be a very inept investor who didn't consider how to integrate that back into their process. And PG is not an inept investor.

<comment><USER20> There really isn't any need for such hostility, especially since you are wrong. OP wanted to know if YC searched through applications looking for rejects that ended up being successful. That's a very specific question.

PG says that's not how it works. I guess you think the way YC works is stupid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hashtag PGQuestionOfTheWeek

</comment><comment><USER22> Reviewing rejected apps would be a waste of time given how many apps YC has received. Also, what does 'big' mean? I doubt a startup exists that was rejected by YC then grew to a $1B valuation--someone would probably have heard of that by now, made a big deal of it, and those of us on HN would know. But I don't doubt that YC-rejected startups have gone on to raise a few rounds of funding and/or may have even made <$100M exits.

<comment><USER7> _Reviewing rejected apps would be a waste of time given how many apps YC has received_

Only a small number of those will have made it big since then, though (by whatever definition). So they'd only have to look at a small amount to see if there were any indicators that they might have overlooked.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is according to you the best vizualisation tool for today? - <AUTHOR> If i still need 3 monitors connected to my lapotop it s because there is no good vizualisation tool so far to handle complex data correlation. What is according to you the best vizualisation tool available today? Thks <comment><USER2> Excel along with Hive and Hadoop Map/Reduce.</comment>


Birds found using human musical scales for the first time - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/11/birds-found-using-human-musical-scales-first-time?utm_content=bufferc81d2&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

<comment><USER2> very cool!

original source doc: [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/10/29/1406023111](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/10/29/1406023111)</comment>


Show HN: Take a break Headlines for hackers - <AUTHOR> http://take-a-break.davidjaimes.tech/ <comment><AUTHOR> I would love critiques on this! It's the first project that I took from concept all the way to deploying with Travis CI to a AWS EC2 instance. Any input is much appreciated!

<comment><USER2> Just a heads up, your reddit username/password and all the API keys you used are exposed in the browser.</comment></comment>


A Strange Grid Reveals Hidden Connections Between Simple Numbers - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-sum-product-problem-shows-how-addition-and-multiplication-constrain-each-other-20190206/ <comment><USER2> Overview of the sum/product problem by Tao [https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2007/12/06/milliman- lecture-i...](https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2007/12/06/milliman-lecture-iii- sum-product-estimates-expanders-and-exponential-sums/)

[e: that lecture is almost a decade older than the result mentioned in OP]

</comment><comment><USER3> I studied applied mathematics but I have to admit number theory has always been, and probably always will be, a total mystery to me. My whole intuition is tied to dynamics and computability, and this is just absolutely alien. I'm probably more in awe of number theorists than the average person because whereas they group them with mysterious 'mathematicians' (with all their attendant mystique and implied genius) I've actually "been there, [tried] to do that" and failed, and that marks it out as an almost insurmountable peak.

</comment><comment><USER4> My intuition was already screaming 'it'll be the other way around for a geometric progression' before I read that far, but I'm damned if I can understand or even speculate why. Most likely I don't properly understand it.

I'm inclined to wonder if there's a third operator which could be tested like this, such as exponentiation, but that's not commutative over integers.

Of course, if there are similarly intriguing patterns for noncommutative operators (and their sequences) the obvious next step would be to look at complex numbers and quaternions...

<comment><USER5> > My intuition was already screaming 'it'll be the other way around for a > geometric progression' before I read that far, but I'm damned if I can > understand or even speculate why.

It's a question of forcing the number of sums/products to be low. An arithmetic progression forces a large number of identical sums for the obvious reason: (a+b) = ((a-k)+(b+k)) = ((a-2k) + (b+2k)), and so on, and those differences of _k_ are... the definition of an arithmetic progression.

The reason a geometric progression produces a lot of identical products is exactly the same. (ab) = (a/k · bk) = (a/kk · bkk)...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe I don't understand the full implications of the problem, but it seems obvious that a multiplicative table will result in more 'numerical diversity' than a summation table. Both multiplication and addition yield points on lines described by the usual mx+b equation. Addition constrains x to 1, so all of the results will be clustered near the origin, with more coincidences as an unavoidable result. Conversely, if x is allowed to exceed 1, the resulting 'lines' will spread out on the graph and leave more room for unique points.

What am I missing?

<comment><USER7> _"but it seems obvious that a multiplicative table will result in more 'numerical diversity' than a summation table"_

That isn't true. If you pick the set of numbers _{1, 2, 4, 8}_ , you get 10 different sums (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, and 16) but only 7 different products (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64)

<comment><USER6> Sure, you can always find special-case exceptions, but I still don't see why the result is surprising in the general case. There are a lot more arithmetic progressions than geometric ones.

<comment><USER8> > There are a lot more arithmetic progressions than geometric ones.

I'm pretty sure that's not true. An arithmetic progression is x[n] = x[n-1] + k and a geometric progression is x[n] = x[n-1] * k

<comment><USER6> That's a good point, I'll have to stand corrected on that. Just a matter of swapping one operation for another.

<comment><USER9> If you consider all finite sequences of positive integers with all values below some limit M, it might be the case that there are more arithmetic sequences than geometric sequences. I don't think that's relevant to the article, but might be where your head was when you made that post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's almost like one dimension of entropy has been exhausted.

</comment><comment><USER11> "A long-standing puzzle seems to constrain how addition and multiplication relate to each other."

The first thing to remember is that multiplication IS Addition..

</comment><comment><USER12> Good job they explained what "distinct" means...

<comment><USER13> This is maths we are talking about, you should never assume that the common usage of words applies to the precise definition used in the maths context. Take the Boolean inclusive "or", for example.

<comment><USER12> I think people that know 'product', 'geometric series', etc. know what distinct means. It doesn't have some special mathematical meaning here.

<comment><USER13> Sure, but this is not an article aimed at those people. Note that geometric progression is also defined later on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This kind of feels like it's touching on some of the same themes as the ABC conjecture.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have been tree and

</comment><comment><USER16> i dont get it...what is the hidden connection exactly?

<comment><USER17> 'connection' is a somewhat misleading way of stating it. It's more like the opposite of a connection. A set of numbers cannot have trait A and trait B at the same time.

Trait A is that the numbers have a certain kind of similarity in their spacing, leading to few unique sums. Trait B is that they have a certain kind of similarity in their factors, leading to few unique products.

So from some angle it's interesting that you can't impose both types of patterns on a single set of numbers, because that inability implies a relation between two very different operations.

But on the other hand why would you assume that you _should_ find an intersection between two restrictive algorithms? Maybe there's a hidden assumption that the algorithms would be random-ish and let you find an overlap if you search hard enough, and that assumption is screwing with people's intuition.

<comment><USER18> > _Trait A is that the numbers have a certain kind of similarity in their > spacing, leading to few unique sums. Trait B is that they have a certain > kind of similarity in their factors, leading to few unique products._

This is an excellent way to describe it. I had the sense that "of course the geometric sequences will collide more when multiplying" but if you asked me "why?" I would have trouble explaining. So thanks.

As far as finding a set that has an equal number of distinct sums and products, would it be possible to come up with a sequence that's "half"-arithmetic and "half"-geometric?

<comment><USER17> Even a single value that doesn't fit in one sequence will cause a lot of extra values, so your ability to fit multiple patterns gets worse and worse as you go longer. Something like 2 4 6 8 16 does pretty well for its size but even then it's giving you twelve distinct outputs for either operation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Minimal Lisp in ~70 lines of Haskell - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/950199 <comment><USER2> I think this might be some of the most beautiful code I've seen in a long while

        value :: Parser Value
        value =
              List <$> (char8 '(' *> sepBy value (takeWhile1 isSpace_w8) <* char8 ')')
          <|> Number . fst . fromJust . B.readInteger <$> takeWhile1 isDigit_w8
          <|> Symbol <$> takeWhile1 (inClass "A-Za-z\\-")

The power of parser combinators representing the elegant lisp syntax.

<comment><USER3> I'm familiar with parser combinators, but not the Attoparsec or other libraries. Furthermore, I have limited Haskel experience, so I'm struggling to read this. In particular, the use of symbols and overall terseness are hard to get through. I'm also really uncomfortable with the order of operations of all these operators.

Now, I know that Hoogle exists, so I'm able to look these things up, but it's pretty tough to untangle. Particularly when searching for

      *>

I found something that reads "This module describes a structure intermediate between a functor and a monad: it provides pure expressions and sequencing, but no binding. (Technically, a strong lax monoidal functor.)" Which is so full of jargon, my head hurts. And I even know what most of that jargon means!

So as far as I can tell, here's what's going on....

      Foo <$>

Defines a grammar production using the left argument as a constructor on the matched value of the right argument.

      <|>

Separates productions as alternatives; in a PEG Grammer style. Both the <$> and <|> operators combine functions to result in a big master function that takes input and has the result type that is the big `one of A, B, C` algebraic type that is defined earlier: "Value".

      char8

Matches a literal character (passed as an argument).

      char8 '(' *>

Reads a parenthesis and throws it out of the result set. Similar for the close parenthesis later on.

      takeWhile1 isSpace_w8

Produces a parser that consumes whitespace.

      sepBy value (takeWhile1 isSpace_w8)

Combines to produce a parser which reads a list of values (recursive here) and presumably eliminates the separators from the result.

      takeWhile1 isDigit_w8

Similar story, reads an integer.

      Number . fst . fromJust . B.readInteger

Is a composed constructor that may or may not parse an integer, forcibly assumes it will succeed to parse one (which we know because we're reading digits). That integer parse stops when it hits a non-digit, and the unconsumed characters are returned as the second element of a tuple, so we call fst to take the first element of the tuple, discarding the unread characters (the main parser will consume those).

      takeWhile1 (inClass "A-Za-z\\-")

Similar story again to the whitespace and numbers.

OK, yeah, so.... amazing. Incredibly brilliant little bit of code. But holy hell was that tough to read. And I have no idea if I'd be able to write it in only a few hours. I'm far from certain I'd ever learn to write it as fast or faster than something more verbose.

Please let me know if I've misunderstood something....

<comment><USER4> _"I'm familiar with parser combinators, but not the Attoparsec or other libraries. Furthermore, I have limited Haskel experience, so I'm struggling to read this. In particular, the use of symbols and overall terseness are hard to get through. I'm also really uncomfortable with the order of operations of all these operators."_

This is why I've never identified with "code should comment itself".

I'm not afraid to admit it: I am a dumb programmer. As a dumb programmer, the only way for me to be a good programmer is to be effective.

To be effective, I need to minimize the "time spent understanding code" phase of software development. Furthermore, I will likely be working within a team.

The opposite of that is to be writing "prototype" code --- code which is written to explore the problem space and to gain a better understanding of specific patterns to best accomplish a goal.

But once the prototype phase is over, all of that code is deleted, and is replaced with commented code. (If possible, I try to explain each step of the algorithm in English, first, and _then_ write the code. This is slower, but results in far fewer bugs and a more solid foundation.)

I look at it this way: when my life ends, either I will have gone as far as my own brain was able to take me --- or I will have gone as far as _my team's_ brains were able to take _us_. I'm willing bet my life that teams of "less brilliant" people are more effective than individuals of excessive brilliance. I write my code accordingly.

\</comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

That said, there is no excuse for laziness. Even if I am merely "competent", it's important for me to strive to be brilliant, even if I'll never attain it.

<comment><USER5> In my opinion, this code comments itself, even more so than a manually, written-out parser would.

Here's how I would think about it. What would a grammar for Lisp look like?

        value := list | number | symbol
        list := '(' value + ')'
        number := [0-9]+
        symbol := [A-Za-z-]+

OK, great. Now how do I look at this code?

        value :: Parser Value
        value =
              List <$> (char8 '(' *> sepBy value (takeWhile1 isSpace_w8) <* char8 ')')
          <|> Number . fst . fromJust . B.readInteger <$> takeWhile1 isDigit_w8
          <|> Symbol <$> takeWhile1 (inClass "A-Za-z\\-")

Even if I don't understand the combinators, I can blank them out for now and focus on the recognizable semantic bits. I see List, Number and Symbol, ok, so my guess is that <|> does something like a | might in my grammar, and each line corresponds to a different way a value can be expressed. For list, I see some quoted '(' and ')', so I guess that 'char8' means "match this literal." In fact, I can just read all of that off, and it makes sense. Nevermind what _> and <_ are doing, I'll ignore that for now. And so forth.

Suppose I wanted to make a superficial change, like make $ a recognized symbol in the language. That's super easy. I don't even need to look at the docs. If I want to introduce a new syntactic construct? A little harder; I'll have to go check the attoparsec docs. But you'd have to look up the docs for a library in any language, anyway.

All's not well; in particular, this code conflates the tokenizing and parsing steps (notice that I don't say anything about whitespace in my grammar, but there's some line-noise here dealing with it.) That decreases the readability a little, but you gain efficiency with it.

Maybe there's a tradeoff: the use of a library and symbolic combinators makes it harder to tell precisely how the code manages to actually do any parsing. That's true of any abstraction. But what's really great about this is that I can easily tell what the big picture of the code is. A page or two of state machine would not do that for me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The content of Fun is actually the type: Context -> Value -> (Context, Value).

If you flip the arguments, you get: Value -> Context -> (Context, Value). The (Context -> (Context, Value)) is actually the State type:

        State s a = s -> (s, a)

I modified your code to use this type. During the process, I encountered some peculiar things (and factored out some things), see comments in code.

<https://gist.github.com/950445>

Funny that it turns out slightly longer when re-using more code due to syntactic artifacts. Monad comprehensions (recently restored to GHC via an extension) would resolve that.

<comment><AUTHOR> The eval throwing away context does not make any sense in retrospect. I think I made it that way because of some ghetto-scoping ideas.

You broke car and cdr somehow (these don't evaluate their arguments anymore), but I have no idea how you did this.

This was mostly a training exercise, this is why there is no significant use of monads in there: I simply haven't learned enough about them to feel comfortable using them.

<comment><USER6> Can you give the example that breaks car/cdr? They seem to be evaluating their args here:

        fst $ repl "(car (cons 1 (quote ())))"
        Number 1

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, that was my fault. I didn't make lambdas evaluate their arguments and I didn't notice this in my code. I.e. car/cdr work correctly, fun doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I do not know Haskell enough to fully judge this, so maybe someone can correct me, but that seems _very_ minimal. From what I understand, it doesn't even have arithmetic operations, it "executes" incorrect programs without any error (try repl "())") and also it doesn't have any kind of scoping, for example in the following code a function argument is bound in the global (and only) environment:

 _Main > repl "(begin ((fun (x y) y) 1 2) y)"

([("x",Number 1),("y",Number 2),("begin",Fun),("car",Fun),("cdr",Fun),("cons",Fun),("cond",Fun),("def",Fun),("eval",Fun),("fun",Fun),("t",Symbol "t"),("quote",Fun)],Number 2)_

I don't think it's fair to call this a Lisp at all at this point. There is a nice writeup of implementing a Lisp in Python by Peter Norvig, where at least the most basic things are implemented correctly (and the code is documented): <http://norvig.com/lispy.html>

Also, I get errors even with some very simple statements that theoretically seem to be implemented like:

 _Main > repl "(cons 1 2)"

([("begin",Fun),("car",Fun),("cdr",Fun),("cons",Fun),("cond",Fun),("def",Fun),("eval",Fun),("fun",Fun),("t",Symbol "t"),("quote",Fun)],List

[Exception: lisp.hs:48:8-48: Irrefutable pattern failed for pattern (ctx', [v', (Main.List vs')])_

Am I doing something wrong here?

<comment><USER8> This is clearly a golfing exercise. If you want a more full featured Lisp check out Write Yourself A Scheme in 48 Hours by Jonathan Tang: [http://jonathan.tang.name/files/scheme_in_48/tutorial/overvi...](http://jonathan.tang.name/files/scheme_in_48/tutorial/overview.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cool, only 70 lines!!

(plus a ton of libraries)

j/k ;-) Actually, I like this - it shows how cool Haskell really is! No, wait - it shows how cool Lisp really is! No wait... I'm confused... :-)

<comment><USER10> You might also like: Lisprolog <http://stud1.tuwien.ac.at/~e0225855/lisprolog/lisprolog.html>

"Some online books show how to implement a simple "Prolog" engine in Lisp. They typically assume a representation of Prolog programs that is convenient from a Lisp perspective, and can't even parse a single proper Prolog term. Instead, they require you to manually translate Prolog programs to Lisp forms that are no longer valid Prolog syntax. With this approach, implementing a simple "Lisp" in Prolog is even easier ("Lisp in Prolog in zero lines"): Manually translate each Lisp function to a Prolog predicate with one additional argument to hold the original function's return value. Done. This is possible since a function is a special case of a relation, and functional programming is a restricted form of logic programming.

Here is a bit beyond that: lisprolog.pl

These 162 lines of Prolog code give you an interpreter for a simple Lisp, including a parser to let you write Lisp code in its natural form."

</comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra See also <http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp-in-haskell.html>

<comment><USER11> And 'Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours"

[http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H...](http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Now if someone will just write a 70 line Haskell interpreter in lisp we can have lispkell all the way down.

</comment><comment><USER13> How long did it take to write?

<comment><AUTHOR> About 2-3 hours. Lots of breaks though; I started about 16 hours ago and finished about 4 hours ago.

<comment><USER14> So it's really 6-12 hours. You're working on the code in the background; you _probably_ couldn't just have written it three hours straight. Or more likely, you were sorting out the details within the 12-hour period but you had been toying around with the idea for days if not weeks.

Just guessing and certainly not trying to look down your work, it's beautiful. It's beautiful even if it had taken a week to write. The time to write it is just interesting because it is exactly this that makes programming hard to measure.

How does any explain his productivity to a boss if you get seemingly nothing done for four days and then write a nearly complete solution on the fifth day? How much is one actually working after all, counting all the time that affects the work? Does it count as work if you go biking on a Saturday but you kind of subconsciously think about your work and then you write great stuff on Monday, thanks to that?

One thing is for sure: you're much better off measuring a programmer's efforts by his accomplishments instead of the time to do them. This is backed up by the fact that an entrepreneur programmer gets rewarded much more fairly than a salaried programmer.</comment></comment></comment>


Money can buy you happiness. Up to a point. - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727770.101-money-can-buy-you-happiness--up-to-a-point.html

<comment><USER2> Same topic, many articles:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668979>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668909>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668478> <\- This one

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1667603></comment>


Show HN: Play20Back – MTV as It Looked 20 Years Ago - <AUTHOR> http://www.play20back.com/?hn123 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi people of HN, I'm glad some of you like this little project of mine! BTW in case is not clear it (automatically) shows videos from exactly 20 years ago, so right now is showing videos from July of 1995.

If you wonder where I get the data is by a script scraping an awesome forum called ukmix. I also filter out low-quality videos by calculating the likes/dislikes ratio and view count (data from YouTube's API), it also tries to filter out lyrics videos and other non-official music videos. Feedback is welcome.

Enjoy.

<comment><USER2> Very cool project. Can you let us adjust the time? I'd really like to see MTV from 30 years ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> 10, 30 and 40 are easy to do because I have sources for those, so I will add that functionality soon (any other time frame would be a lot of work so probably not going to do it)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Congrats! I think this is a cool idea! It looks like you're pretty much committed to a 20 year target but would it have been possible to allow the user to set that target themselves (within a given range, of course)? Instead of 20 years being the default, they could specify 25, or 15, or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is awesome! Will definitely use it to throw a quick stream of older Music Videos up on the television. It would be cool to see a list of that month's videos or be able to customize the stream a little.

For those who miss place to discover current artists through music videos, I built [http://kikbak.tv](http://kikbak.tv). It goes through blogs hourly to create a top 100 chart for the day. Artists spend so much money on music videos and there are no popular discovery platforms! I truly miss mtv, so let's rebuild it somehow.

<comment><USER5> I actually think that's the exact opposite of the original point, and it simply should be left alone to be what it is. By "customizing" the selection, it loses a large majority of the nostalgia.

Maybe... just maybe... have the default be this way, and a tiny tiny link saying "click here for the new web 2.0, users are in control, why not just search youtube yourself, upvote this, downvote that... empowering... customizable... have it your way, right away at burger king now version"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like it, but I don't remember half of these songs/videos ever being on MTV.

This is more of what I remember: [http://www.mtv.com/music/yearbook/index.jhtml?contentId=1536...](http://www.mtv.com/music/yearbook/index.jhtml?contentId=1536070&year=1995)

and:

The Real World

Beavis and Butt-head

Singled Out

<comment><USER7> 20 years ago I had just graduated from high school. 120 Minutes was still the best thing on MTV and yeah, Beavis and Butthead and the rest of Liquid Television were great. I still consider "The Real World" the start of when MTV (and TV in general) started moving in a direction I personally didn't like. It was MTV's big move toward scripted and unscripted dramas and away from music videos and some other "experimental" video like the aforementioned Liquid TV.

I get that it was a market-driven move. Networks show what gets the viewers and viewers wanted Real World/Road Rules. Just bummed me out when those shows started pre-empting or replacing the stuff I enjoyed like Beavis and Butthead and Sifl and Olly before eventually replacing the music videos themselves.

At least there are way more avenues for finding music and videos these days so I can't really be too annoyed outside of curmudgeonly nostalgia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ahh back when the "M" in MTV stood for "music" (and the odd Beavis and Butt- head episode).

<comment><USER9> Not "Mediocre," as it is now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pretty much entirely unusable in germany due to, roughly, half the videos being blocked. :(

<comment><USER11> I think YouTube is one of my main reasons for using a VPN here in Germany. I try not to use the german internet without my VPN switched on for a couple of reasons but that's definitely the most annoying one.

<comment><USER12> What are the other reasons?

<comment><USER11> \- Privacy on shared Wifis (at University)

\- Shady law firms sending mass letters

\- Geo blocked content

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Now I can look forward to 2021 when this will be Imitation of Life non-stop.

</comment><comment><USER14> So good.

Feature request! intersperse classic MTV intros like these [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajbSFYV- maQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajbSFYV-maQ)

</comment><comment> w0rd-driven Keeping the artist and track title visible at all times would be the only usability thing I would change. I'm often going to the youtube link to find this. I keep this as a tab open in Chrome while I'm doing other work so being able to go back when I find something good and just having that information available would really help.

</comment><comment><USER15> I like the idents you've added as well. Was the style you used one of the styles on the American MTV? One of the big things I remember about MTV (Europe, at least) were the idents, including the track/artist ident at the start/end of songs.

I haven't been able to find a decent archive of them though.

</comment><comment><USER16> You're awesome.

To make it really authentic, the text that states the artist and track title shouldn't be so sharp. It should look as blurry as the video.

Other than that this is a perfect bit of fun. I love the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER17> 20 years ago is when I graduated high school. We used to actually watch MTV. Talk about nostalgia.

</comment><comment><USER18> Feeling like a teenager again! But on the other hand, thanks for making me feel old! ;)

</comment><comment> Ono-Sendai Video quality is a bit too good though :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Never play music or sound on load. Even if it's your page only purpose, put on a simple "play" button in the middle of the screen, and start playback after user clicks it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok seems reasonable, I will change that soon.

<comment><USER20> I prefer it this way. When you changed your TV channel to MTV, there was no play button.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Bookmarked it. Ad pops up every time you get a new video. Deleted bookmark.</comment>


Goldman Sachs and the $580M Black Hole (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/business/goldman-sachs-and-a-sale-gone-horribly-awry.html <comment><USER2> Unless you don't have any negotiating power, I would be very hesitant to take an all stock deal from a non Fortune 500 company. Too much counterparts risk to come up on the other side with nothing.</comment>


The Environmental Cost of Internet Porn - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/12/the-environmental-cost-of-internet-porn/548210/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> This article seems to be reaching. Reading it through, the basic claim is "Porn is really popular. Serving out streaming porn causes power consumption. Without any really numbers or information, we think that must be bad for the environment compared to old style porn on tapes, magazines, and DVDs."</comment>


Abandoned Ride-Share Bike on Washington State Ferry Prompts $17,000 Search - <AUTHOR> http://gcaptain.com/abandoned-ride-share-bike-on-washington-state-ferry-prompts-17000-search/ <comment><USER2> Well that's ridiculous. It seems like the easy solution would be to count passengers entering and exiting the ferry instead of assuming a passenger fell overboard because something was left on board

<comment><USER3> Walk-on passengers don't necessarily walk off, they can get in a car and drive off if they meet someone on the ferry (as I have done before when running into family on the same ferry). It's difficult to count every passenger in every car as they exit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why not use cameras?</comment>


The 3D art behind America's great engineering projects - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-57383248-52/the-3d-art-behind-americas-great-engineering-projects/

<comment><USER2> I wonder if they're releasing the 3D models too. Would be pretty cool to load them into a game engine and say, walk around the space shuttle.

<comment><USER3> I have done a similar experiment. I pulled the 3D building data from google earth for a couple of square blocks and importing into a videogame level editor to create a walkaround simulation.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Clone all of your GitHub repos at once - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jsnider3/CloneGits <comment><AUTHOR> This was just a quick tool I made so that I could setup my stuff on a new computer quickly. Hopefully someone else finds it useful.

<comment><USER2> It's nice! I'm setting up a new Linux install on my workstation, and I found this really useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that is literally the situation this was made for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This looks nice, but I typically use something like this:

        curl https://api.github.com/users/[username]/repos | jq .[].clone_url | xargs -n 1 git clone

Only works for public repos though.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's clever and is the first time I encountered jq, so thanks for introducing me to something new.

Personally, I prefer python solutions to shell solutions, since its easier to maintain / add features.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anyone have suggestions for other features I could add?

<comment><USER4> 2 I can think of:

      * work with orgs
      * pull if clone already exists

<comment><AUTHOR> If you give me a couple minutes I'll add a git pull option.

Getting a user's organization repos is something I will also add to the queue.

Edit: We now run a git pull in repos by default and it can be disabled with a "\--nopull" argument.</comment></comment></comment>


Could we have "Fair Trade" games? - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LukePearce/20090923/3171/Could_we_have_quotFair_Tradequot_games.php

<comment><USER2> The used game market already gives the developers money, because a market for used goods increases the value of new goods. It comes into play whenever an item retains at least some of its value after being used by the primary consumer.

For example, take home prices. If there were no market for used homes (say there was some strange DRM on houses) very few of us would be willing to put down the huge sums of money required to buy a house, but we do because we know that we can recover a lot of that value later if necessary. Additionally, houses loose very little value over time and land rarely loses value, making it worth buying a $100k house even if $90k is just tied up as value that you can get back when you sell it.

Video games, now that we're beyond the days of cartridges, never actually degrade. There should be a perfect market for used games, though popularity and time take their tolls. I'm willing to copies of good year-old games for $30. If you buy a $60 game and then find me a year later it is almost like you only paid $30 making that other $30 more like an investment required to get the game earlier.

If developers continue to try to restrict games to single systems or other ways of limiting the amount of resale, that makes the game worth LESS to me, as I lose the ability to resell or loan out the game. A healthy used market actually incrases the first-sale market.

Perhaps someone else can provide a citation, as I'm unable to find a relevant link via Google.

<comment><AUTHOR> The "Fair Trade" approach seems irrelevant in the retail model of distribution (trading cartridges and discs - much like used books), but takes on vastly different implications in the service model (Xbox Live, Steam, Appstore).

I would be more comfortable with the downloadable platforms (as a curator at an archeological media lab) if it were possible to maintain the same kind of liquidity associated with the physical media by trading them in public markets (given that most game vendors prohibit or discourage transferring game licenses), even if it meant paying a royalty to an existing corporation to do so until such a time as the work enters the public domain.

What scares me is not being able to access these works in a hundred years. Would a royalty system enable one to open the markets by fostering greater income much like how the traditional used game market in brick-and-mortar "allows" for higher prices on new games.

Related: "Valve: Are Games Too Expensive?" <http://tr.im/zEJW> or [http://www.edge-online.com/features/valve-are-games-too- expe...](http://www.edge-online.com/features/valve-are-games-too-expensive)

<comment><USER2> Similar to the digital music industry, it seems that the publishers are trying to spin software as something you have licensed instead of something you own. This can be seen very readily in the MDY v Blizzard case that's going on right now. Blizzard claims that they only license the game to you, even though you bought a physical copy at a store front. Because they own the game and you only license it they can say that you don't have the right to modify the memory. You would essentially be bound to anything they want to put in their EULA/ToS in this case.

This does have a very chilling effect on archival systems. When you aren't able to format-shift a piece of media or it is bound to only one player then eventually you will loose access to that media, either through hardware failure or obsolescence.

Copyright law section 117 gives you a lot of rights for software you've purchased and owned, but treating it as a license circumvents that clause and gives the publisher full control.

[http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/09/you-bought-it-you- own-i...](http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/09/you-bought-it-you-own-it-mdy-v- blizzard-appealed)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why should a game developer get to profit from the resale of the game? That flies in the face of every other after-market. Do the engineers at Ford get a bump every time an old mustang changes hands?

</comment><comment><USER4> This is not necessary. Games prices factor in the value they bring to the first purchaser for their ability to resell it. Blocking reselling (whether by making it harder or flat out banning it) will result in either lowering the price the game can sell for, or, more realistically, lowering the number of games sold. Making reselling more expensive lowers the value of the game to the customer, and this won't be made up for in any other way. (If the used game purchasers were willing to pay full price, they already would be; they are demonstrating their price consciousness by not doing so.)

This plan won't result in raised profits for game makers; it will lower them.

</comment><comment><USER5> If anything, there should be attention and pressure brought on these companies for their abhorrent practices during crunch time and worse post-crunch ("oh you just gave up months of your life to line our pockets - here's your pink slip. We'll call if we're hiring again").

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure what this guy's problem is. If this is what he wants then every time he buys a used game he can just send a one-pound cheque to Electronic Arts or whoever.</comment>


Toki Pona (a minimal language) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona <comment><USER2> I would be remiss if I didn't link to the Toki Pona episode of the great Allusionist podcast:

[https://play.radiopublic.com/the- allusionist-m69DWK/ep/s1!6b...](https://play.radiopublic.com/the- allusionist-m69DWK/ep/s1!6b4b4f89e3f4dc9adf44f1fa539267cd3d93997d)</comment>


At What Temperature Does An eBook Burn? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cultofmac.com/160797/at-what-temperature-does-an-ebook-burn/

<comment><USER2> Worst fanboy ever ...</comment>