Stop pouring hot water down the drain - <AUTHOR> http://green.yahoo.com/blog/ecogeek/1010/stop-pouring-hot-water-down-the-drain.html <comment><USER2> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=529552>

And the messages there indicate this device probably isn't practical, it has too many caveats. And if you want to do this, you attach one to the main sewer stack of the whole house - it's been available for about 20 years.

<comment><USER3> The trouble with that is that by mixing the hot drain water with cold water you spend the energy heating the cold water and lose efficiency. You want to avoid the cold toilet flush water and whatever and just get the "hot stuff".

<comment><USER2> Don't warm the entire cold water supply - just what goes to the water heater. But do it in the basement, where all the pipes already are, not under the shower, and not with a small device that is likely to get clogged.

<comment><USER4> No, he means that by putting this on the main sewer, you are running your cold drainwater through the same exchanger. If you put one under the shower only, you know you're starting with hot water.

Really, if you were starting fresh, you'd probably want a hot drain and a cold drain down in the basement.

<comment><USER5> Unless you're refrigerating your water, the water going down the drain will always be warmer or at the same temperature as the incoming supply. Since these things don't hold water, they exchange the heat as the incoming and outgoing streams move past each other, thus the effect is essentially null when you're using cold water (brushing teeth) and positive when you're using hot water (shower). When you're using water "asynchronously" (bath, toilet), there's no effect since the incoming and outgoing water move at different times.

<comment><USER6> Again, this is about efficiency, allow me to explain in more detail:

The rate of heat transfer is proportional to temperature difference. If you have a predetermined amount of time for the heat to be extracted, you will get more out of a small amount of hot water than a large amount of tepid water, even if the total energy from the temperature delta to cool incoming water is equal.

The predetermined amount of time is given by the hot water capacity of this device and the flow rate - i.e. how much time does a litre of waste water spend in the exchanger when the shower is in operation.

Plus, there are other practical advantages to using only water coming from the shower, washing machine, etc., as it will normally not contain large particles that could clog things up, particularly when the water is stagnant or slow- flowing in the exchanger.

Finally, you'd ideally feed this still relatively clean water back into the cisterns of the toilets, which don't need to run on drinking water.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for arguing my case. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The one that's always confused me is having a Fridge in a cold climate.

Always wondered if there was a technology that could simply couple the fridge to the outside temperature.

<comment><USER8> I remember staying in a Youth Hostel in Scotland in cold weather, and people keeping their cartons of milk on the outside windowsill 'in' the kitchen. (Presumably there was no fridge.)

The point being: if you are in a cold climate, you can just keep food outside (suitably protected, etc., etc.).

<comment><USER7> Yeah I used to live in Zurich. Great for parties. Just put the beer on the balcony :-)

<comment><USER9> Beer on the balcony. A time-honoured tradition at Hotham.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The purported savings are comparable to what you would save by switching to tankless water heaters: [http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/consumer/your_home/water_heatin...](http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/consumer/your_home/water_heating/index.cfm/mytopic=12820)

The tankless heater also doesn't have the energy cost of building this grey- water heat exchange device. It does have the energy cost of being built itself, but that's probably comparable to the cost of building a standard heater with a tank.

Your best bet energy-wise would probably be to go with a tankless heater as near as possible to the shower, maybe combined with a hypothetical system like the one in the article, except it would warm the water going into the tankless heater. Or you could not drain your bathtub until the water cools, if you need to heat your house anyway.

</comment><comment><USER11> I usually wait a little while for the water temperature to stabilize, before getting in. That transient period will be much longer with this gadget.

\- time it takes for the heat exchanger (gadget) to warm up due to shower drain water. \- now the shower water temperature has changed (increased), so you need to adjust the valves. \- another transient time for the heat exchanger to warm up, etc.

Depending on the design, you might find yourself wasting a lot more water, or jumping around in the shower as the temperature keeps changing in this slow control loop.

<comment><USER12> There are shower control systems, purely mechanical, that regulate the temperature themselves. Those systems would automatically adjust to the changing temperature of the "cold" water.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The diagram shown in the article doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. They've got the output of the heat exchanger going directly to the supply of the shower where it mixes with the output of the water heater. This actually reduces the temperature of the shower and, as phugoid already noted, introduces undesirable temperature transients. It seems to me that it makes more sense to use the heat exchanger to preheat the feed to the water heater. This has the added advantage of making the energy exchange mechanism generally applicable to any hot water that exits via the drain which supplies the heat exchanger, not just shower water. Also, when you finish your shower and shut off the water, there is still heat in the drain and still water refilling the water heater, but the design as shown does nothing productive with that energy.

Of course, one would hope that the heat exchanger itself is made of highly corrosion-resistant material. It would be quite nasty to have a leaky drain introducing gray water into your potable water supply.

<comment><USER14> It only reduces the temperature of your shower if you would otherwise be standing under 100% hot water, which would literally be lethal with a typical hot water system (I'm guessing you don't have a typical hot water system?). It's more likely you are using a mix of, say, 70% hot, 30% cold. If you use this thingy to heat the cold water, you could get the same temperature with maybe 60%/40% mix, thus using less hot water and getting a cheaper and/or longer shower.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps most people have the thermostat on their water heater set higher than it really needs to be? On the other hand, as a bachelor, I concede that my hot water usage pattern is not the same as an average household with a family of 3 to 5 people. I typically do use 100% hot water for my showers. The only exception to this is if I run the dishwasher or the washing machine a few hours before taking a shower, which will result in 100% hot water being too hot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Doesn't it make more sense to use the hot, gray shower water to heat the water going in to the hot water heater?

<comment><USER16> On first blush that sounds like the way to go, but for most existing homes it would probably be suboptimal.

To reduce costs, a device like this should be localized to a room rather than force you to route the water from your shower all the way back down to a water heater. The latter would necessitate a major plumbing addition.

<comment><USER7> Agree - and given the locality (i.e. there is someone using heat/hotwater right there), it would make sense to use it as soon as possible.

If you didn't have locality, the water heater approach probably make more sense -- i.e. Your washing machine, dishwasher, which tend to hold on to hot water and then dump it at the end of the cycle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This would work well in my house, but not for the stated purpose.

We have a hydronic heating system (hot water circulates through pipes to toasters...kind of like old radiators but more efficient). A heat exchanger from graywater to our heating system would help our winter gas bill quite a bit.

Tying it to the dishwasher and washing machine would help out a lot too.

</comment><comment><USER18> there is a similar idea for high insulation homes where you heat exchange the outgoing air (recirculated for freshness) with the incoming air to avoid having to cool/heat the incoming air as much

imo, heat exchangers are a good way to reduce consumption because they're usually passive and don't require much maintenance

<comment><USER19> That's a great idea. Modern gas boilers and tankless water heaters often run their exhaust and intake in concentric pipes, so that the outgoing hot air warms the incoming cold air.

<comment><USER20> Furthermore, the flow in the two pipes is usually in opposite directions because it's more efficient that way.

<comment><USER19> I think that the intake and exhaust are always in opposite directions, regardless of whether it's efficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My cheaper version: Stand in my own filthy gray water and then leave it overnight. Problem solved. Of course now I have to solve this jock itch on my feet...

</comment><comment><USER22> Now this is value added. The key would be for housing developers to adopt this.

</comment><comment><USER23> this is super cool.</comment>


Failures in mobile space cost Steve Ballmer half his bonus - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/09/30/failures_in_mobile_space_cost_steve_ballmer_half_his_bonus.html <comment><USER2> So what's the difference then? Slumming it in Bermuda vs. Boracay for holiday?

I think it is great when the high profile guy takes one for the team, but do we really need to know? We all know Windows mobile ain't doing so hot now, but it is better for MS that they've spent time in the space learning lessons.

<comment><USER3> Not even that. His salary is rounding error compared to his net worth.</comment></comment>


Wickr, the encrypted messaging app, finally goes open source - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/wickr-encrypted-messaging-app-goes-open-source/ <comment><AUTHOR> As ever, I wait with interest for people like @tptacek, @moxie, Matthew Green, Trevor Perrin, Bruce Schneier and others with serious crypto skills to give their views on Wickr's code.</comment>


AngularJS Pro-Tip: Be Mindful of HTML Attribute Ordering - <AUTHOR> http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2761-angularjs-pro-tip-be-mindful-of-html-attribute-ordering.htm

<comment><USER2> Trying to get points from angular lovers and haters? Your previous submission was about "Don't use Angular". Pro-tip: try to do it with jQuery - much more stronger reactions are guaranteed.</comment>


How to be awesome - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/09/how-to-be-awesome/ <comment><USER2> Total shock reading this article, not noticing the author, and suddenly seeing textadventures.co.uk, a site where I wasted plenty of hours in middle or high school. Really awesome to see that Alex Warren has gotten a job he loves since then.</comment>


Goodbye, iTunes - <AUTHOR> I recently installed a beta of macOS Catalina to try out the new Music app that will replace iTunes. I was disappointed to find out that (1) the installer had removed the iTunes app from the Applications folder, and (2) the new UI was considerably different with some key iTunes features removed or gratuitously altered. I guess it's time to look for a replacement. Sad. <comment><USER2> What exactly were you expecting? 1) You said it yourself, it's a replacement. 2) See 1.

</comment><comment><USER3> iTunes actually hasn't been nice to use since about 2004.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thank God- can't stand that bloated mess of a product.</comment>


Hacking people with gradual engagement [15k+ plays in 24hr] - <AUTHOR> http://playspeedball.tumblr.com/post/28436153096/gradual-engagement-for-15k-games-in-24-hours

<comment><AUTHOR> All feedback welcome. post here or on the tumblr!</comment>


Ask HN: How has the labor force changed in San Francisco over the past year? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> For both technical and non-technical roles?

</comment><comment><USER2> The market is extremely tight.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean by tight?

<comment><USER3> This usually refers to the supply of available workers is low and get picked up right away when they appear on the market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a year older.</comment>


Star Trek 1971 Text Game (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/28228/Star-Trek-Text-Game <comment><USER3> This is the first computer game I ever played. My mom was a secretary at a local university, and there was a computer lab across the hall from her office. I'd go there after school to wait for a ride home, and someone logged me in and set me on my way. This was all on paper-feed terminals and I'd take the stack of printout homes and read through each game over and over. This is when I fell in love with computers.

In the early nineties I decided to learn about unix, and this was the first game I played after setting my first BSD box up. This is when I fell in love with unix.

Thanks for the game, to the original programmer(s) to all the people who have kept it alive. This program is special to me.

<comment><USER4> This was also the first computer game I ever played! It was on an HP 2000 computer running timeshared BASIC from a clunky teletype, in the early 1970s. The best part was that you could just type "LIST" and it would print out all the BASIC code - all the games on that machine were open source!

If the Klingons beat you, you'd get this disheartening message, which I remember to this day: "The Enterprise has been destroyed. The Federation will be conquered. You are dead."

I also remember playing a car racing game on the same machine, and also a game about landing a spaceship on the moon (which, a few years later, I created a real-time version of on a 6800 microprocessor in machine language). But the Star Trek game was definitely the best one.

<comment><USER5> I remember all three, my father used to leave me at the console when he would take me to work on the weekends at IBM. Not sure that was system 3 or not.

Between that and reams of green bar to use at home for "artwork" I found my fascination with computers. Didn't hurt we had first generation IBM PCs and before then my father had about everything heath kit put out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looking at this source code brings back memories. Star Trek was ported everywhere there was a BASIC.

When I was 16, in 1981, our school got it's first computer, a Commodore Pet. 4K of RAM! Basic! Hi-tech graphics on the keys!

We only had one, it was in the library, and you had to 1) sign up for it, and 2) get a pass to leave study hall to come to the library.

My math teacher was an easy touch, so I scored a pass every day to go to the library. Unfortunately, other students also wanted to use the computer, and there was quite a bit of hijinks involved with actually making it happen (Hint: never sign up in pencil).

I learned how to code going through the Star Trek game and figuring out how it worked.

As a side note, my nemesis at the time was Roland. So I spent the formative years of my programming life creating a game called "Kill Roland" in Pet Basic. It was mostly Space Invaders, with a little bit of Star Trek thrown in. Little Rolands ("R"s) would come down from the top of the screen, you would use the arrow keys to move your guy around at the bottom, and the space bar launched missiles. There were smart missiles, that you could control after firing, heat seekers, and so on. Of course, the Rolands just kept coming, more and more of them (at times splitting in 2)

All the other kids at the library loved that game. Roland, not so much.

Fun times. I'd love to play Star Trek in BASIC again. (Zork would be a close second)

<comment><USER7> You are so right about the memories. We played a version of this on a teletype. A game would take a box of paper in the library. lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you like this kind of thing, try to find copies of books by Dave Ahl - <USER2> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games)

I like this kind of thing and I have both books. A family friend CP/M system was by first gaming experience and I played all of them. The Star Trek here exists in a sort of copyright limbo, CBS obviously didn't license it but it was too popular to squash. I remember seeing ports of this to Amiga, Palm Pilot and Windows CE over the years.

Colossal Cave is a contemporary - it wasn't distributed as source (to my recollection... compiled OBASIC.COM IIRC?) so it isn't in the books but it was my favourite.

<comment><USER9> I've actually been re-reading some of the "best of creative computing" books published by ahl. It is really sad instinct to see how the future was largely predicted.

As far as colloidal caves, you should check out The "get lamp" documentary.

[http://www.getlamp.com](http://www.getlamp.com)

<comment><USER8> I was a backer on that one, it's a great documentary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you want to try a version of Star Trek in your browser (ztrek) - [http://z-machine.lilawelt.de/game/ztrek/play/](http://z-machine.lilawelt.de/game/ztrek/play/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I remember transcribing this onto a Commodore 64 line-by line from an issue of _Creative Computing_. And at the end of the day it worked!

</comment><comment><USER12> My favorite: Begin, a Tactical Star Trek Simulation. Its like this game but on steroids. Vast galaxy, a whole fleet in combat on each side, Klingons and Romulans and Orions, many vessel classes! Google it, its everywhere, even Wikipedia.

And I know the guy who wrote it, in fact I still work with him. Tom Nelson, who can craft code like a work of art.

If you like playing these games, I definitely suggest giving Begin a try.

(Why 'Begin'? Because in the progenitor to this game, in BASIC, on an HP2000 there was a maximum code size. Large programs had to be written in pieces and 'chained' together in modules. The modules were numbered but the first was called 'Begin'.)

</comment><comment><USER13> I remember a rather similar DOS game with an ASCII display (and probably a decade younger in coding) that was a turn-based fleet battle between whichever two sides (of Federation, Klingon, Romulan, or Orion) and relative ship numbers per side you liked. For some reason, the executable was called "begin.exe".

Pity I lost track of the disk.

<comment><USER14> Going to take a wild guess that this is "Begin, A Tactical Starship Simulation"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begin_%28video_game%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begin_%28video_game%29)

<comment><USER13> That absolutely looks like it, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > This is an artifact of BASIC. It doesn't really have an effect in C#. In > BASIC, just as in C#, the randomizer could have been initialized based off > the system time. If that was not an option, they should have taken advantage > of the instructions prompt.

User inputted seeds were in a lot of classic text based, randomly generated games - by sharing the seed with friends, you could play through exactly the same game and see who did it better. Multiplayer!

<comment><USER16> I like how he blindly assumes that there _was_ a "system time", or that there was a way to asynchronously poll for keyboard input. At least on the Apple II I grew up with, timekeeping required third-party hardware, and the only way to get user-input without writing assembly was INPUT, which paused the program until the user typed something and hit Return.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good ol' trek was the very first video game I played on the family computer! This was a IMS 5000SX running TurboDOS 1.2, some time in 1983 I think. (Why my father saw fit to buy this thing instead of an Apple II is a question for another day. The best the IMS could do was drive a text-only WYSE-50 terminal at maybe 19200 baud.) Later on, my cousin would dial me into his 3B2 (using Tymnet or Telenet!) so I could play a full-screen variant called "vtrek". I found the vtrek sources on an FTP archive several years ago, but it requires BSD 4.3-style termios, and I just don't have it in me to port it to curses or something more modern.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't know that this game was an ASCII game. The first time that I saw it was the MS-DOS versions egatrek and vgatrek.

</comment><comment><USER19> I played this on an ICL One Per Desk ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Per_Desk](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Per_Desk)), sometime in the mid-80s. I loved it.

</comment><comment><USER20> I learned to program typing this into the mainframe at the college where my dad worked and then fiddling with the code to see what happen. I still learn that way.

</comment><comment><USER21> What is the modern day equivalent to this? So many have commented that this was their first (and mine too!) exposure to computers. Something in php? Rails?

<comment><USER22> Minecraft. Unreal engine modding. And so on ..

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Oh, that's neat... I assume this was the predecessor to EGATrek?

</comment><comment><USER24> I have played ATS a Trek MUSH: telnet ats.trekmush.org 1701

</comment><comment><USER25> How to play this game? .. i downloaded the source but cannot run it..? is there any interface that i require?

<comment><USER26> I would assume that csc.exe will compile it on windows, otherwise you will need to install mono

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> this had a different name on commodore computers with graphics but same exact play and screens</comment>


Sony Pictures Considered Buying BitTorrent Inc - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/sony-pictures-considered-buying-bittorrent-inc-150912/ <comment><USER2> The only thing I would be concerned about is bit torrent sync.</comment>


JavaScript and URLs - <AUTHOR> http://shiflett.org/blog/2011/feb/javascript-and-urls <comment><USER3> Using a # to show JS state changes in the URL isn't some huge developer cock- up like it's being portrayed to be, it's just making the best user experience out of the functionality available - see this for instance: <http://code.google.com/p/reallysimplehistory/>

HTML5 provides the new history.push system, which provides all the functionality hashbangs are being used for without the hashbangs: [http://www.kylescholz.com/blog/2010/04/html5_history_is_the_...](http://www.kylescholz.com/blog/2010/04/html5_history_is_the_future.html). The fact that a new feature has been added for it goes to show that it's something necessary - Facebook, for instance, uses history.push if present, and falls back on hashbangs when it isn't.

It's often a very important thing to be able to do, else if you have (for example) multiple tabs or other frontend navigation for your web-app, pressing back would have to take you right out of the application, rather than back to the last place you were.

<comment> T-hawk It seems that much of this consternation about munged URLs (here and in other threads) is about preserving the functionality of the "back" button.

Why do we need a back button?

The DOS and Unix command lines never had a back button. Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar and Word and Excel never had a back button. Photoshop and GIMP never had a back button. SQL scripts and database servers never had a back button.

Many of these programs do have application-specific implementations of an "undo" function. Perhaps that is the way to go for future software, rather than trying to wedge a universal "back" function into applications that don't really map to that paradigm? What does "back" even mean when the application is a game, for example? Flight Simulator and Ultima and Doom never had back buttons.

<comment><USER4> It's nothing to do with the back button. It's about addressability - <USER2> able to link to things. Links are kind of important on the Web.

<comment> T-hawk > It's about addressability - being able to link to things. Links are kind of > important on the Web.

Of course, but not in all applications and situations. What does it mean to link to the middle of a Farmville game session? It's by definition a transient state within a process that does not need re-linkability or history. Similarly, we've been using desktop applications forever with no notion of addressability. You don't send an image with the expectation that the recipient can jump into the middle of your editing actions in Photoshop.

When a web application is fundamentally about an interactive process rather than publishing content, the notion of back and history can lose much meaning. Using Back as a universal undo button or a URL to bookmark any arbitrary slice of content does not hold up in the world of more complicated AJAX partial dynamic page updates. Should designers continue to contort Javascript and the very notion of URLs to satisfy this increasingly-misplaced user expectation, or work to educate users that sometimes "Back" or bookmarking cannot have a meaningful result?

Nobody expects a "back" or "undo" button in everyday activities like driving a car or cooking or making social conversation. How did this expectation become so irreversibly fundamental in computers?

<comment><USER5> _> Nobody expects a "back" or "undo" button in everyday activities like driving a car or cooking or making social conversation. How did this expectation become so irreversibly fundamental in computers?_

Wow. We're only _just now_ getting to the point where it _isn't_ possible to accidentally render your computer unusable with a few stray actions.

You seem to be forgetting just how unforgiving computers were even 8 years ago, any why iOS devices are so enticing to regular folks.

<comment><USER6> Undo isn't back. They're different concepts. If I send a friend request on Facebook and then click back, that doesn't cancel the friend request.

Don't conflate the two concepts. Undo good, back... not always required?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love how all this semantic HTML police are putting the hate on JavaScript. Comparing it to Flash is a gross misrepresentation. If flash was a superior technology that easily allowed you to create a superior user experience that behaved like browser applications ought to it wouldn't be dying away. It doesn't but JavaScript and Skilled js devs can!

Why should we be forced NOT to use a technology that provides superior response and productivity than what was traditionally possible? Forcing us to live in a world with server round trips for everything just so we can say we perfectly fit within this _artificial restriction_ as defined 20 years ago before any consideration was given to the Internet being used for more than viewing anything but linked documents?

There still exists the 'content web' suitable for browsing and navigating content! For the Wikepedia and the plethora of blogs carrying content that remains as business as usual and has no need to change.

There are other apps like that provide enhanced functionality like gmail, google maps / docs / calendar, Zoho Writer, groove shark, etc delivering a far superior experience to anyone with an internet connection and a modern browser better than any set of hyper-linked documents ever can.

<comment><USER8> > It doesn't but JavaScript and Skilled js devs can!

You might be overestimating the differences between Flash and JS here -- especially when you add HTML5 into the mix. What's to stop a skilled JS dev from playing <audio> when the user hits a page, burning processors with a few autoplaying <videos>, after forcing the user to sit through an interminable, animated <js/css3/svg> 'loading' screen? At that point, it's up to our own good tastes to decide how to wield that kind of power.

<comment><USER7> I don't understand what your saying. What if JavaScript devs use HTML5 tools to purposely create poor experience as witnessed in Flash apps?

Then their site doesn't get return visitors and starts dying, just like Flash is.

<comment><USER8> I'm saying kind of the opposite -- JS/HTML/CSS and Flash are now more similar than they are different. It's not the platform that's the problem. It's what you can do with (and how you can abuse) the platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, where is the solution that gives you pretty urls with HTML5 history for those who can have it, and identical urls preceeded with hashes for those who can't, in an easy-to-use plugin? Also, where is the framework/pattern that makes both styles of URL work in the absence of either technology using something like mod_rewrite?

In other words, how do we get it _all_ , future-proofed, without so much frustration and so many debates?

<comment><USER4> That's a nasty solution though, because then every item on your site ends up with two URLs - a concrete, proper, doesn't-break-the-web one and a lousy Ajax hashbang one.

Having one URL per piece of content is especially important in this age of sharing and aggregation, where you don't want your pagerank / number-of-shares / other metrics spread equally across two different URLs.

<comment><USER10> That's what canonical URLs are for.

[http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify- your-canonical.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe the real problem is that people aren't making a distinction between pulling down content and pulling down content + markup/presentation/interaction.

If you're looking to parse information from a remote resource, you should be pulling it down in JSON or XML anyway, so as long as your application provides data in both human-usable (i.e. Javascripty) format and machine-readable (i.e. RESTful JSON/XML) format, both consumer groups should be happy, right?

I guess one of the problems is that Google only pulls down content + markup. It would be nice if there was a way to provide machine-optimized content to crawlers for indexing, basically telling the crawler "here's the data in XML format, and here's a link to the data in human-interactable format". It's sort of what Google's escaped_fragment URLs do, but escaped_fragment still expects content + markup.

<comment><USER12> I guess a huge problem with exposing machine-optimized content to crawlers is that there are big chances that what the user sees in the end differs from what the crawler sees.

That doesn't have to be by malicious intent, it can be enough that a backend developer adds some fields, and the template doesn't use them.

On the other hand the machine-exposed data misses headlines that are usually present on all web pages, so that if the user searches for <company name> \+ <keyword>, special care must be taken that the <company name> part doesn't fail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone saying that Postel's law is one of the reasons that the web is robust needs their head examining. It was a terrible idea that has been plaguing browsers for a long time.

<comment><USER4> There are no exceptions to Postel's Law : <http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/08/postels-law>

<comment><USER14> There are limits to what generousity should be, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Another relevant blog post on the importance of URL design: <http://warpspire.com/posts/url-design/>

</comment><comment><USER16> The amount of importance placed on this concept of The Web is strange. It's like a religion.

Any developer working on any application has to make decisions and trade-offs about platforms, user experience, accessibility, and a hundred other things. If something else is more important than making the back button work or having pretty urls, then who cares? Focus on what improves your app the most, not adhering to tradition. It breaks the web? Get real, it doesn't break anything. It just has other priorities. The only reasonable barometers for whether something works are user adoption and satisfaction.

<comment><USER17> I totally agree. We are seeing the emergence of completely new uses for web pages, i.e. using a web page as an interactive tool rather than a content delivery system. At the moment the infrastructure just isn't there to provide proper support so we are having to work round it, sometimes with fairly nasty cludges. Until the infrastructure catches up with the change in use, there will have to be compromises. Saying these compromises are intolerable problems that should be fixed is unhelpful and missing the wider picture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Perhaps this is too obvious to state, but progressive enhancement obviates most of this. Any linkable state (that someone might plausibly want to link to), should be addressable via a regular old URL. Add a layer of JS to intercept clicks and serve ajax content, with the state expressed in the hash.

The hash should look suspiciously like the fragment that non-ajax agents would see.

I say this not as a dogmatic _should_ , but because I find separating concerns makes it easier to develop, and preserves web-ness. Ajax is an enhancement, not an architecture.

</comment><comment><USER19> The author seems oblivious to the fact that there are now many different kinds of applications on the web.

If every website was a blog, then sure - addressability, archiveability, searchability are paramount. If you're building the control panel for a nuclear power plant, you have a completely different set of concerns.

<comment><USER20> Perhaps using the Web isn't the appropriate solution for a nuclear power plant control panel. There are other, more suitable, internet protocols to use for this sort of appliance than the Web (if indeed, making a nuclear power plant control panel accessible over the Internet is an actual requirement).

<comment><USER21> Perhaps using The Web isn't appropriate for SCADA controls, but what's the reason why using a web stack is inappropriate? People here seem to forget that things like J2EE and ASP.NET have displaced decades of crappy console and Windows Forms applications.

The moment you accept that there is The Web and there are web apps and they're not the same thing, you're right in the middle of the debate Shiflett is talking about. The down-with-hashbang crowd doesn't acknowledge any such difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can understand people's frustration when the hashbang feature breaks the URL function in the browsers, but it can work nicely if done right. I've built one of my apps using hashbang to encode the browsing state, and had gone to great length to ensure bookmarking and back button work correctly in the browsers.

It works great at the end. Every URL points to a specific page and still gets the Javascript interactivity. Some sample URLs.

<http://www.previouslook.com/hnews/new#!2011-03-01-15-15.22>

<http://www.previouslook.com/hnews/new#!2011-03-01-12-15.15>

<http://www.previouslook.com/hnews/new#!2011-03-01-12-45.12>

<comment><USER23> If you've gone to great length already, then maybe it isn't much additional work to support the HTML5 history API and also provide server-side rendering to non-JS clients.

(BTW, that's a pretty cool site.)

<comment><USER24> It's impossible to provide a server-side fix, since the URL fragment (the part after the hash mark) does not get sent to the server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> We need a complete rewrite of the current web languages. We are struggling with DIVs and positions and more DIVs to obtain a result the coding language weren't first developed to do. I'm mostly pointing at HTML but JavaScript could take a shot at it too.

</comment><comment><USER26> I learned some mod_rewrite tricks for a personal project, only to discover many of my peers consider useful URLs to be unattainable magic!

I think it's a disservice to common users of any site when the address becomes an opaque mess of seemingly random characters.

</comment><comment><USER27> The hashbang is a big gory mess and glorified for all the wrong reasons. Mostly it brakes best practices and destroys the chance for graceful upgradation and degradation.

What is truly amazing is that there actually are other solutions that still offer the best practices like graceful upgradation and degradation with less effort. This article goes into the issues and the alternatives: [https://github.com/balupton/history.js/wiki/Intelligent- Stat...](https://github.com/balupton/history.js/wiki/Intelligent-State- Handling)

</comment><comment><USER28> I agree that JavaScript is breaking the traditional web - linked static HTMLs with some forms in it. But I also believe that one day people will start to forget this bumpy ride. I am thinking of <http://nodejs.org/> and <http://jsdom.org/> \- if the user agent has javascript disabled - the client side javascript code could be executed on the server.

<comment><USER29> In hashbang schemes the client-side javascript is being used to prevent page loads and to reduce server-side rendering (though this second argument strikes me as a red herring).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> " This is what we call "tight coupling" and I thought that anyone with a Computer Science degree ought to have been taught to avoid it."

Unfortunately, there are two reasons why this assumption falls apart. First, there are a lot of non-Computer Scientists out there writing software. Second, the push for everyone-gets-a-degree credentialing and the cries of "we're short on qualified candidates" in industry have led to a serious erosion of standards in universities; either the topics aren't being taught or students are passed without the lesson being absorbed.

On the first point, I think this is a good and a bad thing. It's good because it's democratic. It means that more people are finding their own way, it means that systems are getting more intuitive, it means that barriers to entry are being torn down. Literacy is good for everyone. But it's also bad because the actually trained Computer Scientists and Software Engineers, aren't focusing on keeping this process going. Instead, they just want to open consulting firms and roll out yet another CRUD business intelligence Web app. Concerning, to say the least.

On the second point, there is a serious problem with the number of people we are graduating through universities. And I don't care what the top universities are doing, there are 50 more low-end state schools and technical schools churning out people to each one of them. I know at my university, I received education in such topics of Software Engineering. BUT--and this is a big but--it was all but unrequired knowledge. I can't say any of it was truly "required", because I ended up working with quite a few of my classmates several years later, and they had forgotten it all. They stood in awe of my prowess as a programmer, when all I was doing was using the same lessons we had all received. If you were good enough at programming to avoid basic syntax errors, you were good enough to get through to the end with a barely passing grade. And few hiring managers care about grades.

These people that I graduated with, they have benefited from the democratization of programming as well. We should make this relationship more explicit. Keep Computer Science pure and only graduate people who are up to the chops. Encourage people who want to write websites to go in to Graphic Design. Make programming on equal terms as algebra and creative writing. We all have to study it, we don't all have to be experts, but the people studying the subject specifically had better be held to the highest standards.

<comment><USER31> As a web developer I believe the problem and the bottleneck has and always will be the browsers. If there was an easy way to give our users what they want (flashy, ajaxy webapps) without breaking the web I'm sure developers would be all for it. But for now it is viewed as a time intensive, value add to do these properly. Web developers will always be a step ahead of the browsers and therefore have to resort to breaking the web in order to achieve the functionality their users/managers pay them to create.

The only way this problem will be resolved is for more of your "true" computer scientists to start working on browsers. However, at the moment, many of them are making too much money at their consulting firms fixing the websites created by graphic designers.

<comment><USER30> Users don't want hashbangs. They want faster loading content. Hashbangs are a kludge to get it. This is just one example of the issues that we're running up against with trying to extend HTTP, HTML, and browser technology into an application platform. It's just not suited.

HTML 5 is the right answer to the wrong problem. The problem is not how to make HTML more expressive and more powerful. The problem is how to serve applications to users. We need an open standard for WebStart/ClickOnce, not a hack on top of a hack on top of HTML to make web pages appear like applications (with every web designer's own notions as to how to render UI elements and display notifications and control flow, etc.).

Next time you see a JQuery modal dialog, ask yourself, "why did someone on the client level have to write this code? Why wasn't it part of the platform?" Why do we have competing implementations of modal dialogs on web apps, in today's day and age? And it's often represented by a severely nested DIV in a section of code that has no meaning to the modal itself. Semantic markup, for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Good point. I think it should be mandatary for every site to offer content that degrades to an useable version when used without JavaScript.</comment>


Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable - <AUTHOR> https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/why-a-slack-backlash-is-inevitable <comment><USER2> > "They create problems, high-school-type problems," one CEO of a midsized > firm told me. "People are making fun of co-workers, they're acting > unprofessionally, and it's technically a company system."

The crux of this is that Slack enables long, heated arguments that normally would be defused by:

1\. Being surrounded by your coworkers

2\. The frown of your manager

3\. The strain on the faces of those around you

It basically comes down to 80s/90s era concepts of netiquette: try to imagine that the person you're writing your response to is a thinking and feeling individual, and imagine their reaction to your words. Read out your words that you've written in the heat of the moment and think hard about how they'll be felt when read.

If you have an employee who is prone to ridiculing others and won't desist from doing so when asked...

FIRE

THEM

<comment><USER3> >If you have an employee who is prone to ridiculing others and won't desist from doing so when asked...

>FIRE

>THEM

Honestly, why does this have anything to do with slack. If it's not there, it will be in the break room or hallway or bathroom or wherever. That's a toxic person being enabled by technology. Not toxic technology magically transforming a person.

<comment><USER4> What it has to do with Slack and every other social media platform is that (vs. break-room trash-talk) it magnifies the harassment - it's instantly amplified, spread more broadly, and is more durable.

It also reduces the dampening influences of people's emotional responses in meatspace.

Slack may or may not be better/worse than FB, Twitter, etc. in this regard, but all can definitely magnify divisions in any group of people, from a clique to a nation.

It is just the dark side of reducing the communication friction that helps people work together better (kind of like a hammer is better than a rock for both setting nails and breaking skulls).

<comment><USER5> As a manager/owner, if your team/company has such toxic people, you're better off losing them.

I also wonder if tech ageism isn't at play here. The social rules of high- school and college are _nothing_ like the social rules of the rest of society. In those places, a person can create a group of friends and only interact with them for the most part.

In a real job without high turnover, you have to learn to get along with everyone all the time. Startups (the ones complaining here) aren't known for having lots of older workers who've had time to polish their social skills and have the rough edges worn down (programmers generally aren't known for their amazing social skills in the first place).

I'd conjecture that moving 2-3 older devs onto each of those teams could drastically improve the group dynamics.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely - must lose the toxic people as as fast as possible! They will damage the team at a far faster rate than any possibly contribution they can make.

The one good thing in this, is that, although these social media platforms can amplify and spread the toxicity, they can also make it a lot easier to identify & document.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sorry people, this isn't about about "high school" behavior. This is about preventing workers organization. They are just building the narrative for whats comes next.

Just other day, The Economist also said that Google must "grow up": [https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/07/30/googles- proble...](https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/07/30/googles-problems-are- bigger-than-just-the-antitrust-case)

It looks like, big media point of view is that it is a childish behavior to do anything against the company bottom line. Combat racial discrimination, government surveillance or any corporation misdeed are insignificant compared to the shareholders profits.

Google employees walkout was an alert for the Big Money. The backslash is coming. Big Brother is watching you.

<comment> core-questions > Combat racial discrimination

Interestingly, it has been shown that more diverse groups of employees are less likely to organize and form unions or demand collective bargaining.

<comment><USER4> Interesting, got any citations handy?

<comment> core-questions Yes. On the more academic front:

[https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793915602253](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793915602253)

On a more anecdotal front, Whole Foods is aware of this at the corporate level and so is (apparently) deliberately pushing for a more diverse employee base not to actually improve race relations, but to prevent unionization.

[https://observer.com/2020/04/amazon-whole-foods-anti- union-t...](https://observer.com/2020/04/amazon-whole-foods-anti-union- technology-heat-map/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My experience with Slack was it is a litmus test for your company culture. If you have people prone to histrionics and complaining, it's going to encourage that. If you have cliquish attrition-game players, they're going to create their own parallel channel scheme. If you have grandstanding drama queens who work an audience, it's the weapon of choice for the sort of people who send emails with long cc' lists. If you have hustlers who pretend you owe them things and always seem to cc' your boss, they will use public channels for off hours callouts that sit for hours before you can respond.

The one anti-pattern personality that Slack does mitigate well is people who use in person meetings and phone calls to make after the fact misrepresentations, and I suppose, sales.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I wonder what ever happened to the common-sense idea that culture flows outward from the people with the "power." Maybe it's by example, or maybe it's by unintended consequence. Maybe it's caused by some moralistic / idealistic sort of policy, or maybe it's through ignorance of the unconscious biases that people have.

To that end, Slack, being a communications enabler, merely accelerates the rate of these things happening. You can turn it off, but then you can turn off the company too. You can try to make everything out in the _open_ open, but then you quench creativity as well as meaningful 1-1 interactions between people.

<comment><USER7> We get what we reward, and leaders who espouse one set of values but reward another in practice are necessarily going to promote a layer of jerks. It's the literal recipe for a jerk factory.

To me, if there were a backlash against Slack, it is because it makes a great scapegoat. It's different from a social media platform because social platforms have to deal with the public, where a company has every tool it needs to evolve its culture. Personally, I think Slack could be a much needed twitter-killer by letting channels and instances promote messages to being public facing, while providing much of the value twitter doesn't.

<comment><USER9> > leaders who espouse one set of values but reward another in practice are > necessarily going to promote a layer of jerks

I had to read this comment a few times, because I think it's truly a wonderful insight.

This is true for many things. We should be careful as leaders to espouse and reward the same practices. We should be careful as the led to see what people actually reward and ignore what they espouse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At first I was prepared to despise Slack as it being part of the baggage of that job's sudden interest in Agile Cosplay, but then it looked IRC-like and I figured I would give it a chance.

Ah, I should have known. My reasons, in no particular order:

First, it was Yet Another Communications Channel to Check. You know, email, phone, voicemail, meetings, standups, calendar appointments, and so on. It was one more place I had to scan through on an event loop. I would pay more attention to Slack only to miss something somewhere else. Where was communication happening? Anywhere. And Slack made it worse because we had a skillion channels proliferate, so it wasn't as if Slack were _one_ email inbox, it was dozens.

Second, Agile Cosplayer #1 was busy posting random things like his Spotify playlist for the day (I don't have Spotify) and other stuff. You can't even /ignore like in IRC.

It seemed especially silly when all of us were within ten feet of each other.

Partially my fault: I was late to the smartphone game and have no idea what roughly half the emojis meant, and so I was missing whatever emotional tenor of a lot of messages.

Probably the worst part was that the expectation was that always had one eye on Slack instead of, you know, focusing on programming. There was no "getting back to" someone on it. It was expected I would have it on my smartphone (newly purchased) and have it just running all the freakin' time.

Most of this comes down to local implementation, hence I can point the finger quite a bit at Agile Cosplay, but boy oh boy, does Slack enable and encourage some lousy local implementations.

<comment><USER11> > Probably the worst part was that the expectation was that always had one eye > on Slack instead of, you know, focusing on programming

Haha, yes, my job is exactly like this. If I turn off Slack for an hour to write some code, I get a lot of angry emails from management about why I'm OoO without notice.

Co-workers love to complain to management if you don't respond to them immediately as well. One guy slacked me 6 times in the morning asking for help, I gave him a clear next step of adding a certain formatted section at the bottom of his spec for legal to review privacy concerns, then he never even did that work and Slacked me 13 more times that day which I ignored to get some work done, and management went ape shit.

Now I just double all my coding estimates because I know my real job is to be on Slack 8-5 answering questions.

<comment><USER12> Sounds like your problem isn't Slack. It's an immature coworker and clumsy management using an unproductive expectation of response.

When I'm doing that kind of work, I tend to work in 1 hour blocks. Then I take a break, clear my head, check for significant comms, maybe rely to a couple, and then get back to my work. I have most notifications disabled so I don't get that constant attention drain. This is all part of an effort to manage my time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A lot of my CEO and founder friends talk about this"... rephrased: "My CEO and founder friends are upset that their employees use a piece of software to talk about the toxic culture my CEO and founder friends have cultivated"

<comment><USER14> This reflects my experience. The people I work with now use slack exclusively for work and the odd share of more personal items while on vacation/weekend/walk during lunch. We have similar interests so the content is always welcomed. Any important discussion happens offline or on the phone, though. I can't imagine us using slack for anything outside of trivial, asynchronous messages and events reported by bots.

At most other companies I've had people message me about salary concerns, unionization, anger towards a manager or CEO, endless banter about anything but work, etc. The main difference was that these places were run by people who really didn't care about their employees and slack ended up a reflection of that. A lot of upset, frustrated, resentful venting in private channels.

If slack didn't exist, these conversations would have happened some other way. There's no way everyone could keep sane in a bad work environment without some degree of venting or comradeship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oh, they are doing "unprofessional" things in a tool that facilitates informal communication now, are they?

Well. It's called chatter. That will either happen over the watercooler, or it will happen over text. The only problem is that off the cuff remarks can be part of the permanent record now. But otherwise, they should be harmless.

And also... maybe go fix the problems people are "bearish" about? (also what's this stock market lingo doing here)

> The problematic employee, the employee who would sit around at the lunchroom > and tell people how bad this place is

Well, maybe the place IS bad. And if they are bitching about it, they may still care – employees who have "checked out" won't complain nearly as much (or at all), while looking elsewhere. Or maybe they are just venting and had a bad week. Or it's a cry for help. If the place weren't as bad, other employees could help the person.

> and it's amplifying.

Oh, so other people agree with the person too? Maybe there is a problem indeed.

<comment><USER16> > The only problem is that off the cuff remarks can be part of the permanent > record now.

I don't think you appreciate the scale of how many headaches this can create for a large company. Previously, A says something mean about B at the watercooler, even if somebody overhears it's all he says, she says. With Slack (or any other group chat/IM system), if A says the same thing, it's broadcast to everybody else on the channel _and_ anybody can take out of context screenshots and run squealing to HR/EEOC/lawyers/whoever. And it's all accessible to anybody with a subpoena on a fishing expedition as well.

And you can't just fix the company or the people: beyond a certain scale, no matter how good your hiring process and training, no matter how awesome your company culture and benefits, you'll get permanently unhappy people, shit- stirring trolls, wackos with extreme views and all the other weird creatures that populate any Internet forum. So eventually you have to converge on reserving chat only for strictly work-related comms and training people to take anything with the mildest whiff of controversy to talking in person/over video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This article would've been better with some concrete examples, or a study, or really anything to back it out. "Slack can be used for bad things". Well, so can email, mailing lists, support forums, internal chat systems (jabber), etc.

Not even one example, just "A lot of my CEO and founder friends talk about this".

As with any tool, it's how you use it. Best implementations I have seen of Slack is when the rules are clear for the beginning. Maybe channels are meant to be public and private is an exception, or the opposite (everything private to avoid noise). And clear guidelines. And to be fair, the discussion is usually a reflection of the company culture that is already present: formal, informal, direct. The tool just facilitates it.

<comment><USER18> Exactly. "High-school type problems" are created by immature people, not the tool. That kind of behavior would never be tolerated at any of the companies I've worked at, no matter what the medium.

Tech companies, and startups in particular, tend to have these problems because their culture and leadership is sophomoric and immature, and those people hire and promote (or fail to fire) similar people.

If a CEO thinks this is a problem in their company, then they need to, well, be a CEO and do something about it. Leadership sets the tone. Lack of leadership creates a void.

<comment><USER19> Exactly I've worked at places like this and the cadence is usually set by the people in leadership. If the boss up top is a drunk and boning every 20 year old ( been at one such place ), it sets the tone for everyone else. Also does not help if everyone in the team is young and DTF.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I hate Slack, but for unrelated reasons.

Slack has no priority levels. Slack pings you: is it an alert, a question, an outage, or someone sending you a funny gif? You can't adjust the relative priority of these alerts, so good luck!

I've also seen that it regularly replaces documentation for teams. This is an issue, since slack just scrolls forever. You might have memorized the precise sentence to search for (I've done this), but good luck to everyone else.

All in all I think more companies would be better off with just IRC for ephemeral chats. IRC sets no expectation that you'll catch up with everything that happened when you were offline, which in this case is good.

<comment><USER21> Yes! The Noise Machine aspects, the sprawling dumpster that is threads, and the fact that there's no way for all 7 people DMing me at once to see that there are 7 of them DMing me at once make the platform an indispensable nightmare.

I'm starting to notice that organizations with long term remote experience like Basecamp and Automatic rely a lot more on longer, async communication over instant messaging. There might be something to that.

<comment><USER22> > the sprawling dumpster that is threads

Doesn't the Threads view (Ctrl T, Mac: Cmd T) list all threads you're involved with in chronological order, navigable by mouse or keyboard, and searchable? What's your pain point with threads?

> the fact that there's no way for all 7 people DMing me at once to see that > there are 7 of them DMing me at once

This same objection applies to every other text-based communication medium out there that I'm aware of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As someone who moderates a several hundred person mailing list, the arguments they listed are neither new nor unique to Slack.

If anything, Slack is much easier to moderate than e-mail or other mediums of communication.

<comment><USER24> Bingo. Having a user tied to an actual person, and not just a dog with an internet connection and email address must make it orders of magnitude simpler to address offenders.

<comment><USER25> Isn't this kind of orthogonal to the software you choose to use? Those issues are a factor of public vs. private Slacks or email lists. Internal email isn't just dogs with internet connections, and big public Slack servers may just be 3 people with hundreds of alts and bots for all you know. (Hyperbolizing, but you get the idea.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Turn off Slack and you'll have your employees in WhatsApp groups. What do you prefer? Nobody is going back to email.

If people behave unprofessionally on Slack then that is because they are unprofessional. I've been working with different corporate chat tools for years and haven't seen any major drama. And if the former lunchroom conversation moved to Slack, you can now hold the bad actors accountable.

<comment><USER27> Heck the WhatsApp groups probably already exist. At my last company, the malicious shit (e.g. "marry, fuck, kill" lists of coworkers, racist / casteist memes, etc.) happened on WhatsApp, not the company chat platform. If you don't discourage a "frat boy" culture, one can develop outside your control. People who do that crap aren't stupid, so they'll keep it off company systems but they'll still do it.

<comment><USER22> Did you say anything in any of these problematic WhatsApp groups to "discourage a 'frat boy' culture"? Or did you stay in the groups to quietly lurk, or did you laugh along to fit in?

<comment><USER27> I did quietly lurk until I came out as trans, when I stopped being invited to join them. No great loss to me, but you can understand why I was hesitant to speak up in them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This sounds a lot more like your company culture is the issue than the tool. If you think this sort of thing didn't happen via emails, or even in the office kitchen, you're naive. If you're more interested in broad strokes like banning a tool than addressing acute bad behaviour, you shouldn't be managing people.

</comment><comment><USER29> If decreasing the friction to communicate is causing problems in your company, then maybe you don't have a tooling problem or a communication problem, but a culture problem.

</comment><comment><USER30> There is really no strong argument made in this article. It seems like most, if not all, of the problems they talk about are _employee_ problems not slack problems. Slack is simply a medium to chat with your company and team, one which is pretty easy to use desipite its flaws. Employees being toxic is just that, it's not because of slack.

As others have mentioned, this is a professional communication tool there is no need for fully private conversations. Chats should always be accesible by HR/admins.

<comment><USER15> > _employee_ problems

Employee problems as perceived from some random "CEO"'s perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Yes. It's only a matter of time before there is a backlash to Slack.

I won't understand the backlash when it comes, just as I didn't understand the excitement. Slack is just a chat client. Chat has been around forever. Corporate chat clients have been around forever. What am I missing?

<comment><USER32> Honestly it's just the little details... which are huge. For better or worse emoji reactions and gifs really change the tenor of conversations. You can say its just chat, and that's true, but people are complicated and the smallest of chat features changes interactions so much.

Just as an example, "heres a new feature" vs "heres a new feature (+100 thumbs up emoji)", for better or worse that changes people.

<comment><USER31> >For better or worse emoji reactions and gifs really change the tenor of conversations.

As did emoticons. I miss emoticons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> We use Zulip, which is designed to avoid some of these issues. [https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/](https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/)

I'm happy with it.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think there's something there but I don't think I'd describe it as high school culture. It's more that things are way more permanent/visible. A one off watercooler comment from someone having a bad day is suddenly A THING. Sometimes people need to vent and commune without it going on their permanent record.

I personally find myself doing the opposite and censoring myself on slack, because I know a comment that's funny in context might read terribly a year removed.

</comment><comment><USER34> My coworker wrote a bot for Slack that spams most of our channels with random gifs throughout the day. Most of my other coworkers find it amusing, but to me, it's quite distracting. I opened an issue with Slack to ask them to add an "ignore" feature, but they responded that ignoring anyone is counterproductive so they won't be adding it. Thanks, Slack.

<comment><USER35> Frustrating, but I agree with Slack here. It isn't their job to police the behavior of your coworkers. Maybe try talking to the person directly? Or their boss? Or HR?

<comment><USER36> They don't need to police anyone. It would be you deciding who/what you choose to mute. They give you the ability to mute channels, but not to mute bots. It should be something they could add.

My company's approach is just that bot posts go in their own dedicated channels that anyone can mute or watch as they see fit. That works ok for us. But it doesn't give someone that option in a company that allows bot posts in any channel.

<comment><USER35> I'm pretty sure you can mute bots, since they are just like any other user (right click on bot DM -> mute conversation). Or you can mute/leave the channel itself. You can also hide images/GIFs posted in channels by default.

<comment><USER37> Neither of the options you describe mutes the bot when posting in a channel, which was the feature asked about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is an advantage of Microsoft Teams... the product is so utterly without charm that I doubt anyone is recreationally loitering in it.

<comment><USER32> Yeah, Teams tends to murder conversation. It's not even broken, its just not quite worth engaging with.

<comment><USER39> This is why it will win.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> A lot of these issues seem to come down to:

1\. Just fire the shitty people. I don't know why companies don't do this more in the US - it's at-will, just fire them.

2\. Why are you trying to stop your employees from organizing????

> "The onus is on the CEO," Flory said. "Our focus has been on the values,"

Agreed on this last statement. Ultimately if Slack is becoming a toxic environment there are obviously other issues - employees being able to quickly communicate and organize is not one of them.

<comment><USER41> > 1\. Just fire the shitty people. I don't know why companies don't do this > more in the US - it's at-will, just fire them.

I've asked this question of managers many times. The answer is usually some variation on "The shitty ones are the ones who know how to work the system to their advantage the best. They're the most likely to sue for wrongful termination and otherwise make my life hell if I fire them."

<comment> swagasaurus-rex The best thing to do is to closely and carefully document their inappropriate behavior.

Anybody can do this, not just HR. If you have overwhelming evidence of job misconduct and provide it to your company, it gives them ammunition to defend themselves against those sorts of legal recourses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This seems like a case of shooting the messaging app. It's just human behavior, and it'll happen anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER43> This has cause and effect wrong. Slack may make bad culture worse, but it won't be the cause.

</comment><comment><USER44> Chat is a technology.

Blaming chat for having had a catalytic effect on a toxic corporate culture may underscore the toxicity of the culture.

Maybe a cultural detox would be in order?

</comment><comment><USER45> At first, I thought it was a repost of an article from 2017 or 2018. But yeah, Slack sucks in many situations, especially in large companies. But it's a great tool for a small group high intensity collaboration (small=8-9 people max).

<comment><USER46> Right now, Slack and Zoom are probably the only things holding my small org's collective culture together. Email just doesn't cut it when we're not in the same physical space anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I don't understand the argument against Slack. Obviously this is not about people making fun of co-workers. That's just a bad culture and toxic environment and can happen even at the office. It's also not about Slack creating distraction. That's just how they're utilizing it if they have that issue, which is easy to fix.

Employees organizing union and protest is the big problem for some companies. And I don't think they can live without a communication tool either. Perhaps those companies wouldn't be happy about any tool for this matter unless it can provide some surveillance features.

</comment><comment><USER48> The "high school problems" are the employees organizing, apparently.

</comment><comment><USER49> The biggest problem with Slack is not even the "politics" or inappropriate use. It's the fact that chat is a super-horrible way to farm out tasks.

Go ahead. Ask someone to do something over chat.

Very soon, that request is buried in succeeding messages and no one remember the original task. To me that's why we will stop using Slack, even if it causes some friction in casual communications.

The problem is that managers (i'm guilty) use Slack as a way to farm out tasks to subordinates and then we're not thrilled when those tasks don't get done.

Ssshhhhoooocking....

<comment><USER50> > The biggest problem with Slack is not even the "politics" or inappropriate > use. It's the fact that chat is a super-horrible way to farm out tasks.

I would file that under "inappropriate use". Slack is not a task or issue tracker, use more appropriate tools for that. While it's certainly flexible and can be adapted to many workflows, there are still limits with features it arguably shouldn't have.

<comment><USER5> I'd also add that it might be better to PM someone if you want to be sure they got a specific message.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I don't disagree that a Slack 'backlash' is coming because anything that grows eventually has to stop growing as teams find whatever, NoSQL, NoCode, Slack, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, was not the panacea they thought it was. That's okay.

I thoroughly dislike the basis for the argument. The author does clear it up in the end that Slack isn't the problem, the culture is, but why wrap the story that way just to sound good.

It reminds me of anti-maskers who blame restaurants for forcing them to wear masks. Wrong attribution.

</comment><comment><USER52> I see articles like this periodically here, and I never understand them.

I've used Slack for 6 years with an organization, it's been indispensable, and since I'm remote it's been my window into the company culture, which I'd characterize as healthy.

But then again, my job before that one tried to start a corporate intranet blog and then mothballed it while HR dragged their feet on a proper company policy for the comments section.

So...maybe it's not about the tools of communication, but the people behind them.

<comment><USER53> It has been fine at my work as well. I understand that people get mad that is uses more resources than is necessary, I have that same aversion but that is a pretty ubiquitous software problem today, and is why I asked for the 6 core xeon laptop =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Is slack really causing these things, or were they just happening in secret before?

I could see it increasing the instances, but it could also just be making the instances more visible.

</comment><comment><USER55> This article is basically complaining "employees are using Slack to organize and try to push for a union", and then claiming that's a bad thing. Fun!

</comment><comment><USER56> I was thinking the article would be about the deteriorating quality of Slack and the lack of improvement in their facilitation of perusing channels.

The article was instead that CEOs don't want to get talked about behind their back and so are going to shut it down. While Slack might increase the ease of that, it's not like employees couldn't do it via email or at the water cooler instead. This speaks to leadership problems more than anything else.

</comment><comment><USER57> Your organizations are doing a bad job at mitigating high-school type problems because they are not clearly defining what bad behavior is nor the common stereotypes of problematic Slack users.

If these were clearly defined, people could reference this information when they identify it, and people's behavior would become more policed. Without a strong definition, people can inflict harm from safe gray areas.

</comment><comment><USER58> A favorite quote: "culture eats strategy for breakfast".

Slack and Teams just feed this instinct to spew thoughts without thinking about your communication first. Everything about modern society reinforces this. And it's not remotely generational; or, I haven't noticed much of a difference between generations in regards to depth of conversation. It's just different tools of choice.

So, I'm sure everyone will hate these tools, but really, they just haven't figured out how to communicate deeply and meaningfully together. And no tool is gonna make that happen for you. It's a culture problem.

I'm 100% sure if they ban Slack and Teams, and go back to email, everyone is just gonna hack email to say all the same stupid crap they're saying right now. Maybe it'll slow things down a bit, but I can't see it transforming much of anything.

</comment><comment><USER59> So slack is amplifying a problem... one that happens to be quite common in more paralyzed mediums such as the water cooler ... And before CEOs would ignore it or sweep it under the rug but now it is getting in their way.

Awesome! STOP ignoring your employees! Stop dismissing their complaints. And start LEADING! Yes, when employees complain, leaders are put in the hot seat. Yes, when employees organize, they are being ridiculous. Yes, when babies cry, they need to be consoled. Yet, the solution is not to keep the baby sleeping or be threatening or just dump the baby. These CEOs need to lead. And the employees need to speak louder.

This article is is all about Slack. And designed to make slack look bad. Other communication platforms have the same problem. But the author only focuses on slack. This looks like the opposite of a PR article.

</comment><comment><USER60> Twist. We've been using it as a slack alternative and it truly works as a better email replacement. It's great for announcements, and isn't super overwhelming with every channel organized like an inbox. The UX is super simple. Haven't played with it too much just yet, but like it so far

<comment><USER61> which one?

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Feel like they missed an obvious opportunity to coin the term slacklash...

</comment><comment><USER36> "Ultimately, many CEOs and analysts I spoke with said it's up to company leaders to create a healthy culture and make sure it's lived out."

That's the key takeaway from that article. It has nothing to do with Slack or any other specific form of communication. The headline is just clickbait. Even the CEOs complaining about it admit that the problem isn't the media, it's the culture that they create and control that's the problem.

</comment><comment><USER63> It easier to blame the tool then the culture and human nature.

Those tools just exposed many people subjective/inner feelings/views to the surface. It is up to leader to learn how to deal with the exposure.

I agree that these need to better managed and leaders need to step up, but the older culture of repressing and hiding info is gone in this age, and leader need to learn how to lead in today's world effectively.

</comment><comment><USER64> I don't get it, so if you use a hammer to wreck a car or whatever now hammers are bad? and we should ban hammers?

</comment><comment><USER65> I remember when HipChat was in the position that Slack is in now. At the time it seemed unassailable.

</comment><comment><USER66> > The problematic employee, the employee who would sit around at the lunchroom > and tell people how bad this place is — that's just happening on Slack, and > it's amplifying

Great, on Slack it's documented, so you can fire them.

</comment><comment><USER67> If something as toxic as described in the post is feared, it says nothing about Slack/Teams. It means the company is dysfunctional and the culture is bad. It will happen with or without slack.

</comment><comment><USER68> Bring back the IRC, half the high school problems will go away automatically, fire the immature employees and the remaining half will go away too.

</comment><comment><USER69> I miss hipchat, I truly don't understand why slack exists

</comment><comment><USER70> is the problem slack or people? same argument is said for facebook and facebook serves people since they use it a lot. This only validates the existence of slack for me.

</comment><comment><USER71> Isn't everyone on teams now?

<comment><USER72> No. It's not wonderful.

edit, I'll be more helpful with criticism. I feel like Teams is well integrated into their cloud stuff on the good side. The cons are it very much feels like it is aimed at checking some CIO and HR requirements around control and auditability. Spontaneity and usefulness suffer.</comment></comment>


There might be some problems when we try to make babies in space - <AUTHOR> https://massivesci.com/articles/babies-in-space-brain-organoids-microgravity-alysson-muotri-mind-control/ <comment><USER2> A lot of things don't work in microgravity. Any long-term human space activity will require artificial gravity.

With a 9 meter diameter, SpaceX's Starship could carry a rigid centrifuge large enough to be practical. An inflatable centrifuge could have a larger diameter.

</comment><comment><USER3> unrelated to the article, but that banner at the top, "win a free women of science tarot deck" really makes me hmmmm</comment>


Ask HN: Strategy for distributing promotion codes - <AUTHOR>

I spent a good chunk of today implementing promotion codes for my freemium web app and now that I've got it in place, I'm not sure what my distribution strategy should be.
A valid promotion code will remove any restrictions for a user, the same as paying for an account upgrade would do. My plan is to create promotion codes tailored to specific bloggers and email them with a short pitch and the promotion code, which they can distribute to their audience if they choose write about it. I'm not sure how many free account upgrades I should specify per promotion though. Too few, and I worry it'll be ineffective; too many, and I fear that no one will need to pay to upgrade, which is the ultimate goal.
Any suggestions?
PS. To show my thanks to HackerNews for its guidance, and to celebrate the introduction of promotion codes, I invite you to sign up for my web app, Preceden, a tool for making timelines, at http://www.preceden.com and upgrade for free with a promotion code of THANKSHN, which will let 5 people upgrade for free (maybe I should have made it 10...) <comment><USER2> I'm a startup marketer and I write for an iPhone blog, so I thought I'd share the best thing I've seen.

The very best practice is to a) send a blogger a pitch along w/ a license code. Also send us a video and some pre-made quotes. Your story needs to be easy to write (and ideally an actual story, but we'll take what we can get.) There are some items for which sending a license code does not make sense - for instance, enterprise software, security software, basically things we couldn't really use or evaluate. ("Another day, still no viruses, UI looks good. 5 stars.") If you think we can successfully use your product, send a license code, but err on the side of caution. A screencast might really can be very helpful for some personal productivity products, especially if it's something built to handle complexity.

b) give him/her some set small number of license codes to give away (5 or 10 if you're looking at something w/ a higher price point, more for something lower.) Free trials are really better here than license codes - something that turns off in a month would be just fine.

c) give him/her a discount code that they can send to their audience/followers and their followers/audience will get 20% off. This is actually a great alternative to giving people free licenses to give away, and in my experience works pretty well. And, of course, it will give you a much better idea of how your media outreach is working so you know who you should take out to dinner.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this is excellent advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to know the same thing. Is is appropriate to offer bloggers free license keys or codes in hope of a review?

I tried emailing the editors of a lot of online tech websites about my app and had very little success. I'd love to know how other people have been able to market their apps through blogs/etc.

<comment><USER4> For iPhone apps, it's more than appropriate--it's practically necessary. For other apps, it seems like the right thing to do if you want them to be able to review the entirety of your app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I offer promo codes to whoever asks first, for my iPhone app. I ask they promote it but don't have requirements. I will sometimes send them to bloggers, but mostly just by linking an offer on my home page.</comment>


Our biggest gripes with OS X Mavericks - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/11/after-a-month-of-use-we-dish-out-our-biggest-gripes-with-os-x-mavericks/

<comment><USER2> OS X to me keeps getting progressively worst every release.

Mac Mail is now unusable with large inboxes, spotlight is slow, the finder is still stupid (explorer is better then finder at this point). New power management in the near macbook airs is the worst.

<comment><USER3> I'm still on snow leopard because I didn't like the idea of spaces going from two dimensions to one. Nothing I've read since has told me it's a must-have upgrade.

The biggest thing I'm happy about is the old version of itunes. I can see podcasts in a grid and group them by album rating.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I am really annoyed with 1D versus 2D. However, if you're using a laptop, battery life from Mavericks alone makes it a killer upgrade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One issue that plagues me is that full-screen apps _sometimes_ don't take up the entire screen. They're still allocating space for the menu bar. Lo and behold, _there is an invisible menu bar there_. Sometimes the apps still draw a (totally nonfunctional) window title bar. This only ever happens with Sublime Text, iTerm, and Chrome Dev Tools. Id est the three apps that I spend 99% of my time in. Quick Look also has severe performance regressions. It takes ~20 seconds to open the first time. Not so quick, eh. I suspect App Nap is at fault here.

<comment><USER6> This is most noticeable for me when using VLC and there doesn't seem to be a specific set of actions that prevent the ghost menubar from displaying. I end up just doing random actions (click different desktops, unfullscreen -> refullscreen) and hope the ghost disappears.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Apple really dropped the ball with multi monitor support since introducing the full screen mode. Seems like they have their sight squarely on laptops (with no external monitors) where it works really well (with swipe gestures etc.).

NFS issues... sigh... I'm so used to them that I stopped noticing. Getting Linux and OS X to agree on exporting/mounting NFS shares is why people hate computers.

<comment><USER8> Using samba is legitimately less painful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Mail is probably the roughest part of Mavericks. They removed a variety of options for display and printing, and even after the patch that fixed Gmail issues, it still forces a re-download of your entire IMAP mailbox.

It also does some weird stuff with folders - if you had an IMAP folder named "Archive", it magically became special in Mavericks, which took some people off guard.

<comment><USER10> Tell me about it... Just few hours ago I filed a bug report where Mail hoses up at IMAP-fetching Gmail conversations that are at GMail's theoretical limit - 100.

Spent too much playing with it last week or so, just to get the core functionality out. But hey, it works now. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My complaint is a strange delay that affects the command line, in iTerm and Terminal alike. My coworker also has the same issue. It's quite tedious to type faster than the computer; over the network, I can understand; but locally, with a machine that's not stressed?

I can't help but think the new App Nap is to blame for this, but I have no proof.

<comment><USER12> I have the same issue. Though I've only installed Mavericks on my Macbook Air 11" so far, and I thought that it would be an issue with the machine's limited speed. This delay really bugs me and I hope that it is something software that can easily be fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have to agree with the power button complaint as well. I have a 2013 MBA and I frequently hit the power button during a backspace spasm. I'm not sure if it's a problem with my machine, but it won't come back on right away if I hit some keys or the power button again, I have to wait for what seems like a minute or two.

<comment><USER5> We used to be able to use PowerKey [1] to remap the power key to something useful like ⌦. Mavericks breaks this. The ⌦ still gets sent, but the computer sleeps before anything else happens.

[1]: [https://github.com/pkamb/PowerKey](https://github.com/pkamb/PowerKey)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm confused. Multi-monitor support in Windows worked very well from the start and it's pretty simple.

I've loathed multi-monitor support in OS X for quite a while now. Is this a case of Apple overthinking how to do things?

<comment><USER15> Yes, it's overthinking. It's not so much about multi-monitor, which Apple has had working since the 80s, it's about the interaction with the full-screen mode they introduced in 10.7.

At first they blanked non-primary screens when an app entered full-screen, now they're offering this multiple totally-independent bodge.

<comment><USER14> > At first they blanked non-primary screens when an app entered full-screen

Right, which was of course a terrible idea and I hated it so much I never ended up using full-screen support when attached to an extra monitor (even if I like it well enough when I was just using my laptop on its own).

It doesn't seem to be much different from maximizing in Windows but ever since full-screen support was introduced it's been a bizarre combination of good ideas and the kind of bad ideas that only come about from never actually using the feature.

There's other issues with multi-monitor support in OS X that it sounds like they're addressing in Mavericks, but these other issues as well as loads of app compatibility ones I've been reading about are enough to keep me from upgrading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Personally I hate the "slide" animations when e.g. launching a new full-screen window. It takes about a second, but any keys I press during the animation seem to go into a blackhole (repro: full-screen chrome, open new window, start typing 123456789; typically 1-4 or 1-5 are lost).

Other than that, pretty happy (though I don't use many of the Apple apps).

</comment><comment><USER17> Actually, the new multi-monitor support is great! Besides fixing the silliness (blanked second screen), this one can support screens of different DPI but similar apparent size.

<comment><USER18> Yeah this is much improved over the old system.

Except when hooking IBOutlets up between monitors and the little dialog disappears, which can be annoying as hell. But even with that irritation it's miles ahead of how it was previously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> My only real gripe is that none of my machines will sleep now and I have to shut them down. I constantly keep finding my Macbook Pro burning hot while still closed and on my desk. My iMac does the same. I haven't found a solution yet.

<comment><USER10> Be careful. That much heat near the display can damage it easily. Better to leave keyboard gathering dust than get hue defects on your display.

<comment><USER20> > _That much heat near the display can damage it easily._

Citation needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think I have the same problem with Chrome. When I open some links, Chrome loads the whole page but only shows a white background. As soon as I start to scroll, the content appears. It's pretty annoying.

</comment><comment><USER22> I hadn't noticed the power button migrating into the keyboard until now (still have a 2010 MBP), that's a real step backwards in design / usability.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm having real issues with the windows of certain specific apps (Chrome especially) either vanishing or retreating to the edge of the screen and becoming unmovable each time I lock the machine/it goes to sleep. Really annoying. Hopefully a bugfix soon!

p.s.: a fix I've found is changing the screen resolution (and back again) each time you unlock. hmmmmm.

<comment><USER24> I have the exact same issue, it's driving me crazy. I'm wondering where the issue lie as my partner as the same setup (same version of macbook air/same monitor) and doesn't seem to suffer from that issue.

The biggest difference is that I updated while he did a clean install.

<comment><USER23> I think clean install must be the answer tbh - I upgraded too. I'll let you know if I try it, maybe over the weekend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > _In Mavericks, pushing that power button automatically puts the computer to > sleep, no questions asked._

Wtf, really? That was one of the features I used to show as a sensible difference between mac and PC... that a windows pc will just shut down your computer if you mistakenly touch the power button while handling it, whilst a mac wouldn't...

<comment><USER26> What happens when you press the power button is configurable in windows, and I would guess that by default it shuts down on a desktop and sleeps on a laptop.

The problem here is that Apple put the power button above the delete button and you end up sleeping your computer very often just because you miss the delete key.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Access speeds to my SAMBA server are so bad since Mavericks I had to switch to NFS. Even with the workaround to disable Apple's version of sambaV3, I still have issues.

<comment><USER28> I couldn't get NFS to work. Really wish i could happily live with Linux on a MBPr. But the h/w complexity is proving very hard to support. Might be time to give it another whirl soon.

Also they keyboard layout is fucking stupid. It really upsets me when i'm coding. Going from a standard UK keyboard to an Apple abomination of a UK keyboard is highly mentally disturbing for my small brain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> My gripe is how the Magic Mouse works on Mavericks. On Lion it worked really well, now it flips out all the time. I get scrolling when my fingers aren't moving a lot, especially right to left. But I cannot tell you how many times I've tried to click on something...and only have the mouse move the page down just-a-bit, moving the link away from the pointer.

</comment><comment><USER30> The past couple of years have seen some major fuckups in the desktop OS space for usability.

Windows 8, and now this. Although this is no where near as bad.

<comment><USER28> And ubuntu and kde 4

<comment><USER31> So how's 2007 treating you?

Don't worry, by 2013, KDE 4 is a better and more stable UI than OS X. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The scrolling issue is very annoying. Sounds more like a Chrome issue though as other apps appear to be okay.

</comment><comment><USER33> OSX(n) release fails to fix all other OSX(n-1) problems. Ho-hum.</comment>


Does Not Compute – A new dev podcast from Spec - <AUTHOR> http://doesnotcompute.fm <comment><AUTHOR> We just launched Does Not Compute earlier this week. It's being billed as "a weekly chat about the lives and workflows of modern web developers", and we're going to have a new episode out every Tuesday.

I'd love to chat with anyone who's interested or has any questions!</comment>


SEC Gives Social Investing Site kaChing Green Light To Take On Mutual Funds - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/15/sec-gives-social-investing-site-kaching-green-light-to-take-on-mutual-funds/ <comment><USER3> There are going to be some major-league blowups related to this site...some novice investors are going to learn the hard way that past performance is no guarantee for future performance.

That being said, I'm glad we finally get a chance to publicly review the performance of a group of hobby investors. An experiment like this one should usually run over the course of 50 years, but it will be interesting regardless... Perhaps we will learn something about investor performance, the need to wear a suit to perform well etc. I'm pretty skeptical that investors in a public forum will be able to beat the market over a long period - <USER2> all, their investment methods are _very_ visible and will be copied if successful (which will break any model).

Machine-readable statistics, lots of users..I've been subconsciously wishing for a site like this for a long time. Even Prosper gave me a lot of new insights about the workings and not workings of finance.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Of the 350,000 portfolios on kaChing, 1,500 have actually generated positive returns over the past seven months, which is no mean feat._

The broader market is down almost 40% in that time. But the standard deviation of returns is way up. And it looks like they let you short, too.

I am actually surprised, in this case, that there are so few positive returns. I would expect at least 1% of investors to be betting on financial apocalypse.

<comment><USER5> How do you play a "financial apocalypse"?

You'd have to know the exact market timing or shorting costs would eat you up.

<comment><USER4> You only short with a little of your account, and you keep it constant, i.e. you always stay mostly in cash and 20% short. Paulson, Chanos, etc. didn't set up their pessimistic portfolios so they gradually go down if the prediction comes true, not so they get wiped out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Crazy world, we have web2.0 attack of the clones, now in finance:

<http://stockpickr.com> <http://alphaclone.com> <http://zecco.com>, that's not counting virtual stock market games where you can sell you strategies to others.

Funny how people pile on these "top pickers" and create a self-fulfilling prophecy bubble and then wonder where all the money went.

</comment><comment><USER5> This has to be one of the worst ideas ever. And for the SEC to approve something like this illustrates our regulatory problem. For the love of god people, don't we have enough financial train wrecks already?

Will the US taxpayer be called upon to bail out the Facebook investor? What is wrong with you people?</comment>


Show HN: E-Book Site for Classics - <AUTHOR> http://brainab.com/index.html <comment><USER2> What does this add that Project Gutenberg doesn't provide? And how is an "Apple ePub" different from a standard ePub file?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would say a more intuitive/modern interface. I did not know ePub was a general standard as I had always used it in the context of Apple books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Another similar site: [https://standardebooks.org/](https://standardebooks.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep there's a ton! The one you've linked I have seen before as well

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

The creator of the project here.

This is a major update to a project I submitted a year ago. At the time I could not develop nor set up a website and let Weebly do the heavy lifting. This caused a ton of technical issues and held up the project but since then I have learned the basics of front-end development.

Finally, I recently was able to integrate the Algolia API to add a working search feature to the project.

Now that I have (somewhat) the skill and some free time I plan to make rapid progress throughout the summer!</comment>


Ask HN: Startup scene in Washington D.C/Northern VA. Does it exist? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a lifelong resident of the greater DC area and one would assume that the area would have a thriving startup scene. Anyone know of anything going on there? <comment><USER2> Oh, there's a TON going on here in DC. In fact, Kojo Namdi just had a great panel discussing the current startup climate here in DC. If you have time you can read the transcript here:

[http://thekojonnamdishow.org/shows/2011-02-22/small- business...](http://thekojonnamdishow.org/shows/2011-02-22/small-business-and- tech-entrepreneurship/transcript)

If you don't, here's a few links to get you started:

<http://proudlymadeindc.com/>

<http://hackernewsdc.org/>

<http://www.meetup.com/DC-Lean-Startup-Circle/>

And follow these users on twitter:

@kevindewalt

@corbett3000

@mmayernick

@skeevis

While I'm at it, who else is good to follow around DC? Any DC people here on HN have any recommendations?

<comment><USER3> I agree. There seems to be a lot going on in DC. Kevin and Patrick are doing a great job running the DC Lean Startup Group.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> DC has one the hottest tech communities around, similar in growth to NYC. Here's how to connect:

* Join the DCTech FB group: [http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_144795392232569...](http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_144795392232569&ap=1)

* You can also get on the waiting list at the DC Tech Meetup <http://www.meetup.com/DC-Tech-Meetup/events/16141752/>

* Check the DC Tech Events as well: <http://www.dctechevents.com>

The members are very active and are looking for ways to embrace startups, hackers, etc.

For example, the startupXLR8R launched today. <http://startupxlr8r.eventbrite.com/>

</comment><comment> dc-tech-fan @dctechevents is good too. if you hate twitter: <http://www.dctechevents.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Hi Havoc2005, I'm from DC too and currently starting my own startup. We can always meet up and share ideas. Meetup.com is a good start to meet up with tech startup entrepreneurs in this area.

</comment><comment><USER6> there are a bunch of venture funds there as well, Novak Biddle, NEA, Valhalla, Arpex (new), and others....</comment>