How we validated our SaaS product without building it - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sendwithus.com/how-we-validated/ <comment><USER2> I went though sendwithus zero as an unknowing participant in the experiment, and it sucked.

At the time, the company I was working at was looking for a service exactly like this - a service where our app could just fling events, and then we'd do all the logic to control what emails got emitted on the basis of those events on the external service (and A/B test them). One of our "growth hacking" guys found SendWithUs somehow, and introduced us. We had a few calls with them - the service seemed like it had potential, and we got beta access to it...which was really sendwithus zero, but sending basic email.

We got most of the way though setting up an integration with them, but every time we asked when the A/B testing framework - which was what sold us on the product - was coming online, we were told "it's coming soon, it's what we're working on right now." So we held on for a few more weeks, and gave them some time...but nothing came of it. I was skeptical at the time that they were actually building it, even moreso having read this.

The positive side is that while we were being strung along by sendwithus, we found Vero ([https://www.getvero.com/](https://www.getvero.com/)). They're not perfect either, but we've been on them for 6-8 months, and they've done well for us. They're responsive to our issues, are willing to Skype or chat when we try and develop some sophisticated campaigns on their platform, and have (or so it seems) rejigged their roadmap a few times to add in small features that we ask for. ExactTarget is still a more full-featured package, but I'm happy with the price/value of Vero.

So well done, guys. You've got an interesting story about how you bootstrapped your business, and you're evidently doing OK. I wish you the best, but I can tell you that you won't be getting my business (or my recommendation) - at the time I thought you were small and were actually on the cusp of delivering what you had promised us worked; now I see that we were just one more data point for a feature set that you never planned on having ready when you claimed.

<comment><USER3> Hey Jimmy, I'm sorry to hear that was your experience.

I don't know when you found us, but it did take us time to roll out our A/B testing; we never intended to string anyone along.

If you're willing to chat offline about your experience, please get in touch: email@example.com

<comment><USER4> Bullshit. Your entire "zero" approach is stringing customers along. Which is fine. Just don't try to pretend like you weren't doing something you knew would upset your test subjects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > We spent the next 24 hours getting as many people as possible to view and > interact with the experiment

OP - could you elaborate on how you got these 803 unique visitors within 24 hours?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure - that's probably worth another blog post too. We used a combination of twitter, adwords, marketing forums, and personal network.

<comment><USER6> If you're relying heavily on your personal network I'd be worried that those 803 people were not true customers. Don't get me wrong, I think this is a great idea, but I'm wondering how you know that a 803 person sample size is big enough.

Also - could/would people click on more than one button once they found out they were non-functional? It could be that some features would be best developed in tandem with others.

<comment><AUTHOR> We intentionally diversified the traffic as much as possible, exactly for this reason. Only a small portion of the traffic was from personal networks.

Repeat clicks are definitely interesting. It makes sense that once a button was clicked and found to be non-functional, that may prevent future interaction. But that first click still holds value. It'd be interesting to pull stats on how many unique visitors generated those click events.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone else find this kind of pre-development marketing kind of scummy and deceptive?

It's basically lying to potential customers: You're pretending to offer to sell a product that doesn't exist.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps if we were accepting pre-orders or requiring a credit card. A soft launch like this would be more comparable to a focus group for a traditional product launch.

<comment><USER7> But you're not being honest and up-front about the fact that it's a focus group.

If it was like "Click here to take a survey about what features you most want in an email service" that would be one thing, but that's not the messaging in your case.

<comment><USER8> Effective focus groups aren't up-front or honest either. Effective experiments don't tell the person what the experiment is.

<comment><USER7> But they at least tell you that it _is_ an experiment. Maybe we need human- subject ethics boards for marketers.

<comment><USER9> Just knowing that it's an experiment defeats the purpose. By getting honest responses and behaviors, it is easier to build a solution that people actually need or would actually use.

<comment><USER10> And at the end of the entire process you've wasted their time with a nonfunctioning product.

Focus groups et al. are consensual. This is deceptive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> \- Just because some people clicked on features they want, it doesnt mean they will pay for it once you launch.

\- Just because some people are using your free features, it doesnt mean they will pay for it once it is paid.

\- Just because you have 5 paying customers, doesnt mean it will be easy to find out 500 more.

\- Just because you have 500 paying customers, it doesnt mean what you did to acquire these 500 will scale to the next 5000.

\- Just because you have 5000 paying customers, it doesnt mean that there won't be a new upstart which will dramatically undercut your offering and acquire most of these.

There is a name for this validation process - its called a 'startup'.

<comment><USER9> Well said. Everyone has to start somewhere :)

<comment><USER12> exactly. startups are essentially always validating, beginning with what sendwithus/others did to get a product and idea, and then going through the steps sonink listed. like sonink is saying, there are no guarantees with startups, so you might as well try to stack the deck in your favour right from the get-go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are you sure the value you got from the metrics exceeds the bad will generated by annoying your potential customers?

To me it's a lack of respect for your users and their time.

<comment><USER3> Some people seem to be missing that first screenshot; the landing page clearly started with "Start The Demo" ([http://sendwithus.wpengine.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/03/Sc...](http://sendwithus.wpengine.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/03/Screenshot-2014-03-09-14.27.00-e1394434326899.png))

<comment><USER13> Demo doesn't imply fake features. For me demo would be not my data, perhaps a sample set in there.

I'd have no problem if it said "there's a bunch of features not yet implemented, we have the buttons there to gauge interest and we'll work on the most needed ones".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "We knew that transactional email was a problem worth solving" A story worth telling in it's own right I believe, when clamoring on about lean methodologies. Nice article would love the pre-phase lean story leading up to this stage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely! Prior to this experiment we spent nearly two months talking to customers/partners of all sizes.

The details of that period would make a great follow-up blog post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Relevant similar story: I had this site for years, [http://paycheck- stub.com](http://paycheck-stub.com)

Developed it back when I was doing microsites, and I wasn't really sure what to do with it. My main question: why do people _visit_ , anyway? I figured I'd know what to do with it once I figured out why people were there.

So I did just what these guys did. I created a list of buttons down the page with all the possible things people visiting a site called paycheck stub might want. Hooked them all into Google Analytics. Paycheck templates? Fake paychecks? Loans? Payroll services? A job? Sample paychecks for school or presentations?

Very interesting results. First, about 90% didn't want any of that. God knows why they were there. But out of the other 10%, I got a couple pieces of useful information. They were looking for payroll services. So I put up some banner ads. (I think I took down the Adsense. Can't remember)

That, in turn, provided more ad revenue than simply using Adsense on the site. It also provided me with a list of topics to develop and some search terms to try to hit.

So I developed those topics and tried to do better on those search terms. At one point I was almost ready to jump into online payroll. Fun times!

Then Google killed my search ranking -- I wasn't paying for links or spamming. Beats me why. I got so frustrated with them I gave up.

Still get quite a bit of traffic, though. But now, I'm sure, the traffic pattern is completely different. I wonder if, for static sites with a lot of content, this is something you should repeat every year or so?

Like these guys, I found it a rewarding experience, both for my understanding of the site and for my readers. The reason I'm posting is that many times we view this as a step on the way to creating SaaS, but it can be just a great way to connect with your readers. I bet it's extremely applicable for a lot of blogs.

Wish I could have figured out why those other 90% were there.

<comment> vertex-four Perhaps the 90% were put off by the list of payroll-related things? It likely looked like a slightly more elaborate version of one of those parking sites, with the links to nowhere that are all vaguely related to the domain name (and tons of ads).

Your current site again looks like a spam site. It contains heavily SEOed text that looks like it came from a content farm, some ads, and many of the sort of links that a parking site contains; lots of internal links to more heavily SEOed text.

Basically, you tripped up against heuristics because you look almost exactly like the sort of spam that Google is trying to clear out of its indexes, whether you had good intentions or not.

<comment><USER15> I don't know, vertex. They were organic traffic, and as I recall they were coming for what seemed like relevant keywords. It's been a while, though.

My current site is a micro-site. I and my wife wrote the material. I hand- designed the layout, hand-coded all the html. As a programmer and a writer, I was pretty excited about the idea of microsites a few years ago. Here was a chance to combine my love of writing and programming to create online magazines around particular topics. I envisioned writing dedicated applications, doing some live updating of relevant information, and so on. It was (and is) a pretty cool idea: a spot between a blog and a dedicated topical site. As far as the guts of how the site works, using internal links, scoring highly on search terms, etc? Read that in an article somewhere. The goal is to create a small spider site around a topic such that people land on one page and see the top 3 or 4 related pages immediately, allowing them to browse tangentially if they're in the wrong spot. There's probably a better way to optimize around that than I did, but I never got around to it. And as far as Adsense, I added on ad unit to pay hosting costs. As I said, once I figured out why folks were visiting the idea was to get rid of it. But Google kept emailing and suggesting I bump it up to three units. Go figure.

And yep, Google killed me because everybody else in the microsite business used content farms, cranking out thousands of pages of crap, loading up with Adsense, flash ads, grabbing emails, and so on.

I still think the microsite idea is a great one, although, you are correct, anything that looks like one is going to get penalized. That's a shame. There's still a lot of potential there. Check out my microsite for books that hackers might like for an idea [http://hn-books.com](http://hn-books.com) (This is also a good example of a totally-static site that still has a database and lots of interactivity)

In either case, Google's algorithm decided my couple of hundred hours of programming, design, and writing effort wasn't worth it. After horsing around with the idea for a year, losing valuable time, I gave up. As somebody who was not out to game the system, I was collateral damage in the bigger war against crappy content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > We knew that transactional email was a problem worth solving and we were > determined to build a great solution.

I have a problem with this phrase. Seems to me it needs justification maybe just a verb? I don't immediately think of "transactional email" as a problem...

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, how about "transactional email management"?

<comment><USER16> just as vague. managing transactional email? What's wrong with doing that? Maybe I don't have the problem...I don't get it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I did that with my father's computer store website back in 1998. We had computer descriptions, a price, and a 'buy online' button. The button just had a hit counter on the page, with directions to the store. Every hit meant someone wanted to buy a computer through our website and couldn't. I showed him the data that we could double our sales just by making an online store, but he was not convinced. In any case, the cash flows of that business wouldn't have worked out for him. Still, I thought this was a widely known technique.

</comment><comment><USER18> The apparent origin of the idea, the "button to nowhere" that they linked to in the story is also a good read: [https://medium.com/design- ux/77d911517318](https://medium.com/design-ux/77d911517318)

From a user perspective, I think there are both good and bad ways how this technique can be used:

I actually like the way Sendwithus used it - as part of a very very early "pre-alpha" version where you're not yet interested in providing a reliant service and just want to get a feel for the demand. As a user you're informed early-on that you're looking at a version in development - so you will not be surprised by missing or incomplete features and will maybe even motivated to provide additional feedback.

The downside of this approach is of course that the data you're gathering is really only good for that - an early overview. Your test group will likely be very different from the actual people who will later use the service. The usage patterns will be as well.

The second way to use the technique is how Nick Kishfy describes it in the "button to nowhere" article. In that approach, "buttons to nowhere" are not just inserted into an early preview/development version, but into the actual product as a continuous part of the development process.

This would solve all of the above problems and would give you a much richer set of data over a much longer time span - but from a user perspective that would be the worst thing possible.

<comment><USER3> This is actually a good point -- the "button to nowhere" product is particularly valuable at an early stage.

We're working on a followup story on how we do customer development/feedback with a established product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19>
        We knew that transactional email was a problem worth solving

Really? Hasn't this been solved already, by many businesses (SendGrid, Mandrill, SES, MailJet) – I'm happy you've managed to build something and are seeing some success, but I don't think you're solving a problem that hasn't yet found a solution.

<comment><USER20> Altavista worked ok, but I'm glad Google came along.

I think that your comment isn't a _bad_ one, but should go more in depth. Some markets really are unassailable - others aren't. The reasons are many and sometimes complex, so analyzing one is often quite interesting.

<comment><USER21> I don't think unfunco is suggesting that the market is unassailable. The point seemed to be that this problem wasn't one that needed to be solved (because there were already solutions), not that there isn't room for another solution- provider.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What's the story with using logos for integration (SendGrid, AWS etc.) without actually supporting them? Is it not possible to get into legal issues there as it's quite an effective boost to the site to make it _look_ like you're associated with very reputable sites?

Or.. just something to worry about when people come knocking? :)

<comment><USER3> if they come knocking... ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> We are going through the same approach with our current beta customers (and will be making our demos available to a wide audience in the future too) and I can attest to the validity of this approach. We make it very clear to our customers that this is a demo and their changes will go away if they refresh the page. We don't have pop-ups integrated since we collect emails on another page. I think event tracking should be sufficient but we'll have to see what the data says in a little while.

We actually also use these semi-live demos instead of mock-ups (since we'll be implementing the same pages afterward anyway) since only one of us is proficient with Photoshop but everyone is comfortable with Bootstrap. It serves as a testing ground for various approaches for JS code too.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm wondering if the A/B testing score was skewed due to it being the first non-working link in the menu. Someone going through the menu to see what's possible will probably take a look at the top item first.

A random order for the menu items might have been better. Or maybe not.

</comment><comment><USER25> Awesome way to design a product. I wonder though, how the users reacted when they saw "dead end features". Were there any frustrated users when they saw it was mainly a "mock-up" web site ?

</comment><comment><USER26> this sounds like the most frustrating experience for a user ever

<comment><AUTHOR> In a way that's a good thing - having a user work through the frustrating UI and still be interested in the product is amazing validation. Early adopters can self select.

<comment> mkr-hn It makes them resent you and long for a competitor.

<comment><USER3> Our experience was to the contrary. It's not shown in the blog post, but users were thanked for their feedback immediately.

The reaction was overwhelmingly positive; people were excited that we were building something in this space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Obviously smart and handy way of getting metrics for a wannabe startup but as some comments states I would feel cheated as no real product are offered, but offers are pretended to be real. Thus wasting my valuable time. I bet this tactic will backfire soon as more and more try to do the same. I would be more positive if some incentive were offered, e.g. Thx for your interest get 3 month for free when we launch ...

</comment><comment><USER28> Can't decide how I feel about this. Does anyone feel that this type of testing is kind of dishonest? On one hand, listing a product as available with a price is a great way to gauge interest. On the other hand, telling someone it is "sold out" when it was never available feels wrong somehow. What do you think?

</comment><comment><USER29> I think this approach is very interesting and may give it a try on a product in the future. How did you go about directing people to the demo though?

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent question, and probably grounds for another blog post. We tried to use a variety of channels, including twitter, marketer communities, and even some google adwords.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> So did the API turn out to be a popular feature? I'm wondering if APIs prove interesting on the surface but not always in practice?

<comment><AUTHOR> In our case it did! Our core product today is an API to send templated email.</comment></comment>


Free Open Source Textbooks Growing in Popularity in College Classes - <AUTHOR> http://business.time.com/2012/08/10/free-textbooks-shaking-up-higher-education/ <comment><USER2> The CS department I was in (at a small liberal arts college) often used either textbooks written by one of the professors or previous editions.

The use of previous editions was great. It's not like discrete math changes that much anyways so using a copy we could get off Amazon for $1.70 was a great help compared to departments asking us to spend $80-200 on a brand new book.

Several professors also wrote their own books and just tossed the PDF on their website. One professor wrote a book on Scala for intro to CS classes, another on numerical calculus, a third (no longer in use) on Java and OOP for freshman.

I'm sure this isn't the only CS department in the world with this tradition but it's one that works very well. While you certainly run in to the issue of bad professors forcing subpar work on students, if you've got profs you can trust with the job the results, IME, can be quite good and better than commercially available texts.

<comment><USER3> > One professor wrote a book on Scala for intro to CS classes

Is it publicly available ?

<comment><USER2> It should be on bookshelves soon but I don't know if the PDF is online publicly.

If you're interested, the class schedule with lecture notes for last spring's course is here: <http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~mlewis/CSCI1320-S12/>

<comment><USER4> "Hey, This college sounds familiar."

Dr. Lewis' book is listed on Amazon as having a publication date of October 30, 2012.

[edit: The author himself will tell you; If you're already familiar with programming basics, and just want to learn Scala, you'll be better of with Odersky's text.]

<comment><USER2> That's a very good point, the book really an intro to CS text that happens to use Scala.

(Hey Patrick! Long time since the RCC days...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These business models sound reasonable, as long as the supporting materials are truly supplemental. An open textbook that is complete (for example, with problems and exercises), is a good thing. If the text becomes an advertisement for the supplemental materials, then we have missed the mark.

<comment><USER6> > then we have missed the mark

I don't agree. I have offered an open text, including free supplemental materials, for 15 years (so I think I have some credibility). But other people want to do other things. Free is Free for the authors as well as for the readers. If someone wants to have a go at giving away a text and selling the slides for classroom use then I wish them luck. If students and teachers find that useful then good.</comment></comment>


The Moon has more water than we thought – The Verge - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/24/16020132/moon-water-rock-samples-mining-missions <comment><USER2> "deep below the lunar surface"

Might as well be on the moon, er, in heaven?</comment>


Building a proof of concept? Try Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.vitochin.com/blog/building-a-proof-of-concept-try-twitter

<comment><USER2> I was in a company that created "apps" on Twitter. It's basically a bot that responds to input of a predefined syntax. If you tweet "@twitterbot weather singapore today" it will give you the weather. It could be an execution problem that people just didn't find it intuitive enough to use Twitter this way. So it didn't succeed as a concept prover.</comment>


Humans Can Survive Underwater - <AUTHOR> https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rising-sea-levels-media-alarmism-by-bjorn-lomborg-2019-11 <comment><USER2> What a weird article.

He admits climate change is real and we need to do something about it... but the main problem is the media, which is trying to claim climate change is real and we need to do something about it, but they are too _scary_ about it.

He thinks it's going to go pretty smoothly building dykes to keep our cities from flooding so the media should not be making big deal out of it.

It's not a logical argument to me.

Building dykes to product numerous coastal areas may well be a good answer, but in aggregate that is an absolutely massive capital project. Media reports will obviously need to be part of that since people will need to understand why their taxes are going up and why the government is taking their land.

He also drops this doozy: "The real solution is to lift the world's poorest out of poverty..."

Oh, OK, so it's that's simple then. /s

Frankly, I think this is just a somewhat subtler form of climate change denial. He acknowledges the problem, but then hand-waves the problem away and blames the media.

He might as well be saying we'll use the magic crystals to solve our problems.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. It's true that large parts of the Netherlands are below sea level. The reason we're safe here now is because a catastrophic storm in the 50's killed a lot of people and the government of this rich nation decided to invest in a gigantic public works project to protect the population.

The Deltaworks project is pretty incredible (there's a great museum here all about it). But it certainly wasn't cheap or easy.

"Though officially completed in 1997 at the cost of $7 billion, the Netherlands continues to add infrastructure to the Delta works as needed. It is estimated that it will continue to need construction to protect the area against the rising water levels caused by global warming." [1]

The Dutch public infrastructure department, the Rijkswaterstaat, is called the "Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management". Water management is a huge continuing challenge.

[1] [http://www.unmuseum.org/7wonders/zunderzee.htm](http://www.unmuseum.org/7wonders/zunderzee.htm)

[2] [https://www.rijkswaterstaat.nl/english](https://www.rijkswaterstaat.nl/english)

<comment><USER4> Since I just did the math:

Spending was up to $13 billion in 2013. Based on that, securing all the coast lines of the world to that level will cost over $10 trillion.

And I'm pretty sure by 2050 we will have spend a lot more on updating & maintaining the delta works.

<comment><USER5> Was that 13 billion per year or in total?

So I looked it up, it is 13 billion in total or 1.4% of the yearly GDP of the Netherlands. That seems rather affordable to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I thought it was a great article. Just because we need to do something about it doesn't mean we should let the facts be distorted. Showing a map that has most of South Vietnam under water in 2050 suggests something totally different than what this article points out to be the truth.

The answer is so often "people are bad and need to radically change." The reality is that people are good and we are only capable of incremental change. This article helps show why that is likely to turn out better than alarmists claim.

<comment><USER7> This article is disinformation.

A singular map and strawman-premise do not undermine millions of human hours of climate science, core samples, troves of data, etc. You believe this nonsense at our mutual peril.

The climate crisis WILL utterly destroy human civilization through an ever reducing funnel, an ever tightening noose, and we are currently in the last phase of determining the height of that curves trajectory.

There is nothing "too extreme" to attempt at this point in time. We should be prepared to spend up to 100% of our resources in fighting this existential threat. Certainly giving up fossil fuels is not "too extreme". They were due to exit-stage-left decades ago.

We have the tech, let's make it happen.

And for heavens sake, enough of this fake "moderate" fossil fuel drivel.

<comment><USER6> I just don't understand this thinking. The sea levels 8000 years ago allowed people to walk from the Netherlands to England. Climate change is consistent. Yes, humans are causing it this time and we should try to stabilize the climate. But..

>There is nothing "too extreme" to attempt at this point in time

No, this is not the apocalypse. Aren't you concerned that an even more extreme version of yourself would do something very, very bad to many, many people for the sake of the cause? Extremism is bad.

<comment><USER8> 8000 years ago there weren't large cities with dozens of millions of people living in each one, many of them right on the coast. Humanity didn't need to grow enough food to feed billions of people. There was no potential for large- scale modern warfare that can kill hundreds of million of people. We didn't depend on a wide array of advanced technologies and infrastructure -- which can be damaged, uprooted, or destroyed -- to support a relatively comfortable lifestyle for most people in developed countries.

Incredibly rapid climate change has a much different impact now that it would have 8000 years ago. By the way, the science is pretty clear that then climate change happening today is far more rapid than anything that has happened in recent geologic history.

I agree that spending 100% of our resources doesn't look to be necessary. But 5% or 10%? If this is what the science and engineering analysis tells us we should probably l do, then that seems like a rather responsible and beneficial course of action, given the known risks and the potential unknown unknowns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If I read this correctly he thinks that reducing emissions is too expensive but everything else like increased cost through extreme weather or building dams to protect areas below sea level is totally affordable. I am not sure I agree with that.

But this is how things will probably work out. I don't believe we will make any meaningful reduction in emissions over the next decades so we will deal with the consequences.

<comment><USER10> My reading is different: * Paper says, sea level will rise, with many areas vulnerable * Newspaper exaggerates to say, "OMG people will be at the bottom of the sea" * Article says, well this one bit of global warming we can deal with, as we always did. Dikes will be built, drainage added, and it's all kinda cheap

I don't think they argue against combating climate change.

Another way to put it: let's worry first about the climate change issues we cannot mitigate.

<comment><USER4> > Dikes will be built

* Venice entered the chat *

For reference:

Dikes are not cheap to build and maintain, securing the dutch coasts cost ran up to $13 billion in 2013. That cover about 700km of coast lines & river sides.

Not sure how many kilometers of dikes will be needed, but based on [http://world.bymap.org/Coastlines.html](http://world.bymap.org/Coastlines.html) even covering 10% of the coast lines will cost more about $1 trillion.

<comment><USER11> It's even worse than that. The land he's proposing to secure with dikes includes the land area of all of the island nations in the world. None of those nations can afford that. There's a very subtle racism at play in saying "look the dutch did it so it must be easy." The reality is that a lot of poor island nations are going to be destroyed by the actions of a few wealthy nations, and that isn't the story you hear often. We will lose a ton of arable land. And much of the biodiversity we cherish today will be extinct. There are a lot of children yet to be born to whom we will owe an apology for so thoroughly wrecking the planet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The title should be rich humans can survive underwater.

Yes we have the capacity to run engineering programs that would halt the rising sea levels, we can build huge dykes, perform land reclamation, pump water out and even use the rising sea levels for energy generation.

And while we can save Manhattan and perhaps even venice this won't help Bangladesh and other poor regions which are at risk of being flooded by the rising seas destroying not only their homes but also their ecology putting their limited food supply at greater risk.

And that is a problem a distbalized Bangladesh and other poor(er) countries in South East Asia would destabilize the more established nations like India, China and Pakistan all 3 of which are nuclear powers.

A destabilized middle east and africa would spill out into Europe, a destabilized South America would spill into North America.

You can't rely on local solutions for a global crisis if you want to maintain the same quality of life you enjoy today.

Even in the current political climate which some loonies on the left would call a "fascist regime" in the US no one is going to open fire on millions of refugees that could come to the border once their homes get flooded. And the author also forgets that if we want to save New York we would likely need China to be stable and continuing providing it's manufacturing capacity to the world which means that if its neighbourhood turns into a warzone the capacity of the west to perform these amazing feats of engineering would be greatly diminished.

If anything the media portrays the wrong message, I don't think we are screwed or we have already run out of time and reached some point of no return and I don't think that we will go extinct in the next 100 years due to climate change, I don't see climate change as something we solve but as something we adapt too and maybe eventually reverse but this also something that cannot be performed on a local scale because once it gets really bad and people get desperate they'll flood you and while a dyke can hold off water it won't hold up against 50 million people wanting to get in.

<comment><USER13> The title should be - We need all humans to get rich.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Non-clickbait title:

> "Humans Can Survive Below Sealevel"

Actual article's point:

> An academic paper exaggerated and now we're focusing too much on avoiding > greenhouse-emissions and should instead focus on protecting below-sealevel > areas.

..... Weird article.

<comment><USER15> I thought it was some awesome breakthrough in underwater engineering that makes long term underwater human life sustainable, but the article had nothing to do with that and was much more mundane.

How about "Humans can survive rising sea levels"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A general problem with climate change discussions is that the people who are vocal are largely uninformed, and the people who are informed are rather reserved.

Climate change charities, activists etc. do a very important role, and I am very grateful to them for it, but their impact on my personal level of informed-ness is actually negative.

</comment><comment><USER16> From the piece: "Alarming media stories that twist the facts about rising sea levels are dangerous because they scare people unnecessarily and push policymakers toward excessively expensive measures to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The real solution is to lift the world's poorest out of poverty and protect them with simple infrastructure."

Part of me is hopeful that this might be right.

And another part of me is worried that this might be a overly optimistic view to make us feel better.

I think I am leaning towards the latter when the proposed solution is simply "life the world's poorest out of poverty."

Feels like "we" have wanted to do that for a long time for many reasons.

<comment><USER6> And have been remarkably successful at it, tbh

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The author largely seems to be a skeptic?

[https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/economics/nat...](https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/economics/natural- resource-and-environmental-economics/skeptical-environmentalist-measuring- real-state-world)

We can't hope that some magical technology will come and save us from ourselves. We need to act now with what we have to avoid too much damage.

</comment><comment><USER18> So he's saying that instead of working on reducing pollution, we should rather enable people to survive it, even if it means making them live underwater, because that'll increase wealth? Considering how incredibly unequal that wealth is bound to be, this just reads like a Big Coal backed piece to try and justify the destruction of the planet in the pursuit of profit.

<comment><USER19> No, he's saying that we should stop scaring people with likely future outcomes that are not likely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can we update the link to better reflect the title. [https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/03/24/jacques- cousteaus-...](https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/03/24/jacques-cousteaus- underwater-colonies-from-the-1960s-copy/)

</comment><comment><USER21> I am not sure how much in good faith this author is, but honest discussion about mitigation of climate change needs to take place.

A huge amount of sea level rise is locked in already; the uncertainty is about the rate of change not the inevitability of it.

But straw-man arguments that costal communities are doomed because they are built below the coming high tide levels are not much help. Yes, there is a big and demonstrated possibility to mitigate this. An honest discussion of the costs and risks and tradeoffs is merited.

</comment><comment><USER22> Hella mental gymnastics there. Instead of reducing greenhouse gases, apparently, we should be learning to turn every coastal city to Venice.

<comment><USER23> >we should be learning to turn every coastal city to Venice

This sounds simpler than reducing greenhouse gasses

<comment><USER24> Not really, considering Venice itself is being impacted by rising sea levels.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/15/venice- council...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/15/venice-council- flooded-moments-after-rejecting-climate-crisis-plan)

> Veneto's regional council rejected a plan to combat climate change minutes > before its offices on the Grand Canal, in Venice, were flooded, it has > emerged as the city continues to battle high water levels.

<comment><USER23> Local bureaucracy is simpler to overcome than global bureaucracy which is needed to reduce global greenhouse emissions

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Living on below sea-level creates huge flooding risk, with severe weather or terrorism multiplying the effects. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_Netherlands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_the_Netherlands) Its like living in a city below a dam.

</comment><comment><USER26> "Global seawater rise is ok because we could eventually get used to live in frequently flooded cities". That is the wrong way to see it. Crops (ok, maybe besides rice and a few more) may not adapt. The change doesn't stops there, nor would be the only thing that would change. And things will keep getting worse.

</comment><comment><USER27> Years ago Lomborg and scientific american had a major clash. There was quite a lot to it, here's a summary ([https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-response-to- lom...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-response-to-lomborgs- re/))

"Selective citations of the literature allow Lomborg to make statements that are correct but unrepresentative of the best, full state of environmental scientific knowledge"

"Yet his [lomborg's] critics are rarely attacking the facts in his citations per se; they fault what Lomborg does with them and, of course, his neglect of more relevant citations elsewhere."

Anyway, that's SA's side. Follow the link to find more. Caveats: this was years ago, and the quotes above are my selection, which you may consider one- sided.

</comment><comment><USER28> "stories that twist the facts"

Like this one?

Really, his message is, it's all going to shit, but we can survive?

</comment><comment><USER29> Hacker news likes wierd articles.

</comment><comment><USER30> The author is a long time climate change denier. He's apparently just moved onto a different phase of the denial strategy now that AGW is largely undeniable.

<comment><USER23> Do you have a source showing he is a climate change denier? I think you should provide one given that you posted this trying to attack his credibility.

<comment><USER24> It doesn't take much Googling to prove.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg)

> In January 2003, the DCSD released a ruling that sent a mixed message, > finding the book to be scientifically dishonest through misrepresentation of > scientific facts, but Lomborg himself not guilty due to his lack of > expertise in the fields in question.

<comment><USER31> From what I can tell, that book does NOT deny climate change, it denies the efficacy of proposed interventions.

From the Wikipedia page you linked:

> He became internationally known for his best-selling and controversial book, > The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001), in which he argues that many of the > costly measures and actions adopted by scientists and policy makers to meet > the challenges of global warming will ultimately have minimal impact on the > world's rising temperature.

Misrepresenting climate science to dispute the efficacy of specific interventions is not the same as misrepresenting science to deny that climate change has human causes.

It does however mean that you should take his opinion on these matters with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER24> It's just the next step in the denial. Once "it's happening" becomes transparently silly to deny, the next step is "fine, it's happening, but we can't do anything".

<comment><USER32> Hold on, what evidence do you have that Lomborg ever held that first position? I've run into interviews with him since forever and remember his position has having been very consistent: climate change is real but not an existential threat and we should be more rational in prioritizing our responses to it. Or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "hey don't do TOO much about climate change or else how will the fossil fuel industry be able to sit on it's laurels properly"

Because nothing says "a rising tide floats all boats" more than our currently massively diverging have/haven't disparity. A world in which 42 individuals own as much as 3.5 billion people, in which it was 65 individuals in the same position 2 years prior doesn't sound like a world in which the authors proposed "solutions" function at all.

Maybe that's the point.

Excuse me while I pillage and lay waste. Clearly we wouldn't want to risk doing TOO MUCH to salvage what's left of the age of mammals.</comment>


The Burden of Proof: Why People Must Support Their Arguments - <AUTHOR> https://effectiviology.com/burden-of-proof/ <comment><USER4> Burden of proof fallacy occurs as a form of red herring, an attempt to kill an argument by distraction through evidence requests.

People form all kinds of biased or disagreeable opinions for manners of reasons. If you think evidence is lacking in an opinion do your own research and provide a superior counter argument. Lazy people asking for sources without any contribution to a conversation or effort to find sources of their own is something I blanket downvote.

If you think an opinion is incredibly ignorant or utterly depraved you aren't forced to engage it by feeding the troll. Attempting to kill the bad opinion through lazy evidence requests just contributes an alternate form of trolling.

Ultimately it comes down to motive. You can generally tell when someone is trying to move a conversation forward or simply adding noise.

<comment><USER5> I'm having a hard time understanding how an evidence request could kill an argument.

Suppose someone says Beethoven revolutionized music because unlike other composers he wrote kickass songs in C minor.

Suppose I reply that writing music in C minor isn't on its own revolutionary, and many other composers from that period or earlier wrote pieces in C minor.

Suppose that someone then demands I provide them with evidence.

Suppose I give two famous pieces of evidence: Mozart's Fantasia in C minor, K. 475 and Mozart's piano concerto in C minor, K. 491. Perhaps I even put a little icing on the cake and mention that Beethoven reportedly heard a performance of that Mozart concerto and told a colleague, "We'll never be able to write anything like that!"

What possible benefit would there have been if I had refrained from writing that last paragraph? From what I can see the discussion was essentially just noise _until_ I offered up evidence to support a claim. It cost me nearly nothing to write it, while I would have risked a descent into snobbery if I hadn't.

<comment><USER4> > Suppose I reply that

Then you have a difference of opinion. The other person is free to accept or deny your opinion.

<comment><USER6> It's not really a difference of opinion though is it? Whether the day is nice or not is a matter of opinion. Whether this is a tasty meal is a matter of opinion. Whether anyone else wrote works in C minor is a matter of fact - <USER2> not, and he's provided evidence that shows that other people did - <USER3> established.

This is the whole problem occurring these days - too many things are seen as "well, it's a valid opinion". No, if it's claiming something which can be falsified, it's not an opinion it's a mistake (charitably - if it's done with less than wholesome intention it's something else - a lie).

<comment><USER4> > Whether anyone else wrote works in C minor is a matter of fact - or not

Not exactly. That is likely a statement of fact, which is a conclusion expressed in a factual manner, but conclusions are still opinions. Facts are atomic data unhinged from description. Journalism is a good example of presenting facts in commentary. You will see language like: "according to the memo, person x wrote song y". Journalism is careful to differ to facts as a point of deflection from invention, because when they are fail at such they tend to get sued and lose.

Also, facts are never true or false. Facts are either valid or invalid according to other facts. Something that is not falsifiable is probably an ill formed assumption upon logic.

<comment><USER6> I... get where you're coming from here, but I'm not sure I'm going to agree. Sure, yes, to some extent you can go all the way to Descartes and believe nothing but your own existence. But back to those works in C minor - there's a lot of evidence of them. Recordings. Sheet music. Orchestras who claim to have performed them, and so on. Now sure, you can say that all of those things are also assertions and not facts but at some point the onus flips, and it's going to be on you to provide some reason for why those things should be disregarded.

If you're not going to operate on a basis of "reasonable doubt until falsified by a better theory" then you're where? In an entirely post-fact state, where sure, everything's an opinion. And sure, if you want to be there, nobody has a right to stop you but it's not a very productive state.

Yes, journalists tend to be pretty careful with claims around things where there is reasonable doubt. But there is a reason journalists are not still writing about Mozart and using careful phrasing like "and it is also believed by some sources that other composers may have composed comparable works in the same key". For humanity to work we have to go with "fact until shown not to be" otherwise we wouldn't make it through a day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is unbelievably pertinent. We've grown so accustomed in this virtual world of having avatars and proxies to hide behind, like books judged by their covers with studies showing most folks do not even read beyond headlines, that we want that face value BS to transfer to IRL, thus giving us identity politics and the like. We _want_ to be judged (and judged positively at that) for our packaging and Halloween costumes we present to the world, instead of provable merits. What we'd like rather than who we truly are. And as a one-two punch, the general response is that not enough persons put their proverbial or literal money where their mouths are but where they want their mouths to be.

</comment><comment><USER8> This sort of thing plays well on HN, where we're all engineers and programmers, but it assumes the reader is rational.

People do not make decisions rationally. We think and act emotionally, up to and including ideas and assumptions about each other, what constitutes acceptable behavior, and basic facts about the universe.

Ordinary people don't know or care about the rules of "reasoned discourse."

You're not wrong, though.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm pretty surprised by some of the reactions I'm seeing to this. To me, this article reads just like a logic or debate text book and there's nothing really controversial here.

<comment><USER10> It is exactly that, no more controversial than a logic text book. But post- truth views seem to be getting slowly internalized where opinion is considered another kind of fact.

There were similar debates pre-enlightenment where mystic revelations were given equal or more weight than the "always deceptive" real world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sure, but how does this work in todays era where feelings/opinion are considered by many to be the same as fact or at least valid support for an argument?

<comment><USER12> Is that really what's happening "in today's era"? I think this is a smear tactic--an ad-hominem, if you will--employed by some parties to discredit others.

Take, for example, the following slogan:

> Facts don't care about your feelings.

To me, that reads as a straw man. The enemy is defined to be in opposition to fact, when a more generous reading might be the inclusion of feelings among the facts. After all, we are being sensitive to our environment, and the internal impact of that environment actually matters. I find it funny to think that a person would design any system that impacts humans without considering the _feelings_ it might engender. Without consideration of feelings, we may as well design systems for lifeless rocks.

<comment><USER13> Whether or not feelings should be included as proof for something depends a whole lot on: are the feelings of this person relevant to the argument at hand.

1\. Global warming is not untrue because someone feels a certain way about it. 2\. I might have offended someone based on how they feel. Or a system might be oppressive based on how someone feels

That's as far as I'm willing to let feelings serve as proof anyhow.

<comment><USER14> This can get tricky though, and there's lots of "feelings" all over the place these days. There are a lot of somewhat vague "truths", some necessarily so, that have become largely considered as _all encompassing, final, beyond debate_ truths, even though they may not necessarily be so. This seems a bit problematic to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Knowledge can be gain through proven datapoints and unproven datapoints. Insisting on proof reflects a particular type of ignorance -- the ignorance of someone who hasn't deeply reflected on the history of the advancement of knowledge.

<comment><USER16> > Knowledge can be gain through [...] unproven datapoints

I'm sorry, I don't see how that's possible. Could you explain please?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> >In such cases, it can be valuable to shift the burden of proof back to your opponent in order to get them to at least justify their line of questioning before answering those questions.

This article skates around with this idea of 'shifting the burden of proof'. It does so to avoid actually discussing the fact that some people in discussions are not there in good faith.

There's nothing to prove in a question, so how do you shift a burden of proof in respect of a line of questioning? The article attempts to equate questioning the motives or intentions behind a line of inquiry and the burden of proof. These are not the same thing.

>whereas in civil cases the plaintiff might have a more lenient burden of proof, such as the standard of "preponderance of the evidence", which is the requirement that more than half of the evidence that is presented will support your case.

What the fuck? This isn't right.

<comment><USER18> > > whereas in civil cases the plaintiff might have a more lenient burden of > proof, such as the standard of "preponderance of the evidence", which is the > requirement that more than half of the evidence that is presented will > support your case.

> What the fuck? This isn't right.

It's very close to correct; preponderance of the evidence is the dominant civil standard of proof in the US, though it is more accurately summarized as requiring that the trier of fact (jury or judge, depending on whether it is a jury trial or not) must find your claim to be more likely true than not based on the evidence. ("More than half of the evidence" sort of implies that it's just volume of evidence at issue, which is potentially misleading.)

<comment><USER17> It's not close to correct. It is wrong. The article literally links to the correct test, but the author's language cobbles together of a few sub-links worth of half-digested material that the author doesn't understand to avoid plagiarizing the legal dictionary.

There is no quantitative assessment of how much evidence supports one side or the other in the test at all.

Ignoring how ironic it is to make a mistake of this type, it's particularly grating because adding more evidence to one side of a dispute doesn't necessarily add to how much we believe their position, yet most of the article's statements regarding proof are made with that assumption. He equates evidence with proof (or at least an element in approaching proof), but fails to address the connection between evidence, pre-existing belief and interpretation.

This is why people talk past each other. This is why different news orgs can 'spin' the same facts in opposite directions. Ignoring that complexity leads to mistakes.

This error is consistent and the top parent comment in this comments section notes a particularly glaring weakness in the non-bayesian approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So, is burden of proof a good thing ?

It's fine for me to listen to an argument without proof. If i'm interested, i could discover myself in many cases.

Providing a proof is not free knowledge. Providing an argument is free.

I can relate me in today's conversations. Sometimes i provide an argument for the topic. Maybe i'm not interested into the details of the why, i just leave it for viewer to know the "what", not the "why", and i'm fine with it.

<comment><USER20> > _Providing a proof is not free knowledge. Providing an argument is free._

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Formulating a cohesive statement requires effort, which can include supporting evidence if you are aware of it.

If you make claims and not only fail to support your case but don't even know yourself if what you're saying is true, that's called conjecture. It can be entertaining but is unlikely to be persuasive.

If you intend to persuade your audience, the audience should demand proof and you should have to provide it.

<comment><USER21> Or more concisely, Hitchens' Razor: that which is presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

<comment><USER19> My point is more like this:

If i know the one who make argument could prove it, i'd love to pay it. It's not free to me in this case.

<comment><USER18> > If i know the one who make argument could prove it,

Unless they do, you don't know they can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's burden of proof when people agree there is, not merely when an argument is issued. I operate on the idea that if you want something, it is that desire which convicts you with a burden to actualize it. If I say Pi is 3.14 (a false but useful statement), I feel it's the burden of those who want the knowledge to prove it to themselves what's real.

It's different, of course, if we're talking about special contexts like law. Then the burden of proof is formal because society has agreed upon it.

<comment><USER18> > I operate on the idea that if you want something, it is that desire which > convicts you with a burden to actualize it.

Sure, and if you want people to believe your conclusions, that's why you have the burden of establishing the truth of those conclusions to the audience.

<comment><USER22> Yes so if people want things from each other they should ask what's sufficient motivation for the other party to continue dealing with you.

The negotiation or balance of interests will produce a sort of equilibrium.

Proof is just a good in a negotiation, and it's pretty costly, as opposed to conjecture.

WSJ wants to be heard but not for free. The market finds the intermediate price to read their analysis. The burden is on both WSJ and the audience to satisfy their interests.

<comment><USER23> I like your way of thinking about it. Proof is just a good in a negotiation. To put your point another way, there is one set of rules, considerations and motives for the speaker, and another for the listener. Depending on the context, either the speaker or the listener may be interested in doing the work of assembling evidence for or against what is being said.

OP describes the specific rules pertaining to when a rational speaker is desperate to convince a rational listener of the truth of their arguments. But in real life, and in general, there are many more types of situations.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Driving The Mouse (A startup story) - <AUTHOR> http://www.infochachkie.com/driving-the-mouse/ <comment><USER2> Nice posting. I read this book years ago and I continue to believe it is one of the best startup books out there.

I am sick of hearing about google, ebay, etc. Great companies, but not applicable to most entrepreneurs.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Often in life, "experience" is what you get when you do not get what you want. However, in John and Kyle's case, experience is what they wanted and what they got from their adVenture. They certainly believed in their product, but unlike most entrepreneurs, their startup's journey was more important to them than its ultimate destination._

I'm always fascinated by the "journey" more so than the "destination". In this case, The MouseDriver Chronicles sounds like a great story. Added to my "To Read" list!

</comment><comment><USER4> what happened to them? I checked out mousedriver.com and it looks dead

<comment><USER2> They sold their business. From the beginning, they made it clear that they were interested in learning what it means to be an entrepreneur, rather than grow a huge company.

The sale price was never disclosed, but it was likely modest.</comment></comment>


Google is working on integrating terminal emulator into Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?view=rev&revision=113066

<comment><USER3> My Chrome is getting buggier all the time (now in version 15). Tabs hang, websites crash.

So to be selfish: Instead of adding a terminal emulator, I want my Chrome from 2 years ago back, which was fast, bug free and did not hang.

<comment><USER4> This just in: there are a massive amount of developers working on a single project. Not all of them are on the stability team. Just because they're adding feature X doesn't mean that they're taking any amount of resources away from bugfix Y. It's a false dichotomy typically imagined by those who have never worked on medium to large-sized products.

<comment><USER5> "Various studies have shown that software broadly contains something like 6-16 bugs per 1000 lines of code."

As more features are added, the number of bugs _will_ increase, so in a sense everyone who is not on the stability team is on the instability team. Which means the stability team _would_ need more developers as a counterweight...

<comment><USER6> That also assumes that throwing more developers on the stability team would fix the problem.

<comment><USER7> Not necessarily. It only takes one bureaucrat to reject code that doesn't pass tests or follow required conventions. For example, a good rule of thumb is that no new code will be accepted without documentation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This appears to be specifically for chromium OS not the Chrome browser. If you look at the commit message it references a chromium-os bug.

<http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=23271>

If you're interested in the long term plans for this feature just see all the bugs for this component

[http://code.google.com/p/chromium- os/issues/list?q=label:Are...](http://code.google.com/p/chromium- os/issues/list?q=label:Area-TerminalEmulator)

</comment><comment><USER9> no-one seems to have mentioned it, but this is apparently motivated by the aura project - [http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/aura- des...](http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/aura-desktop- window-manager)

you can see the link via: <http://codereview.chromium.org/8680034/#ps11001> which links to bug <http://code.google.com/p/chromium- os/issues/detail?id=23271> which blocks <http://code.google.com/p/chromium- os/issues/detail?id=21187> which is "important to the Aura effort"

</comment><comment><USER10> I personally would love to have a terminal or an SSH client within chrome. I'm excited to see how this turns out.

<comment><USER11> There is a not-extremely-active SSH in NaCl [1]. This emulator is a prerequisite for it being added [2]

[1] <http://code.google.com/p/naclssh/> [2] <http://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=23272>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That could have interesting implications for the Chrome Notebook (I haven't really used one, but based on what I've heard).

The potential appeal of the Chrome notebook is its security-by-simplicity. If the only thing you can do is use Chromium, then your notebook is basically as secure as Chromium itself is (in theory, at least).

The irony is that we're essentially moving back to the way computers were a few decades ago - people used terminals to access a central computer. We moved to personal desktop computers for a while, then laptops (and mobile phones). It'll be interesting to see if the rise of interest in 'cloud computing' means that, in five years, our primary computers will just be portable terminals to access some main computer remotely.

Personally, I might be fine with that. Network speeds/reliability aside, everything I do could be accomplished easily over SSH, with X forwarding for a few applications. It's possible that these simple tools that we've had for decades could be packaged in a way that appeals to a more general use case.

<comment><USER13> I hope we go the way of the dumb terminal from an ease-of-use standpoint; I want my data to just "be", and not have to worry about syncing/backups/etc.

From the freedom/privacy standpoint, however, I'm not sure. I find it surprisingly easy to imagine a US government agency empowered by anti-terror laws to get access to my data.

This is why I want encrypted cloud computing for all my stuff. I dunno if the large players could actually do that and have the US govt be ok with it.

<comment><USER14> How can you verify the security of the "cloud" hosted data?.

<comment><USER15> The encryption key must reside only on trusted (client side) devices to allow your data to be hosted by a third party without them actually seeing your data.

<comment><USER16> (Golf clap)... and in practice how would one verify such a scheme?

<comment><USER17> What do you mean?

Verifying that data going across the wire is encrypted is fairly easy to do.

You check the data going out is encrypted and that it is encrypted when it comes back. Is that enough verification for you?

Depending on how much you trust the vendor you can go further - run it in a debugger and check where it gets the key for example.

<comment><USER18> How do you verify that the key is not being sent over the network by malicious software?

<comment><USER17> How do you check if _any_ malicious software is doing something? You check what files are being read, and you correlate with network traffic.

You lock down access to files like private keys as much as possible to minimize the possibility of this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> timmy-turner For those that can't wait for google, there are already some pretty mature browser-based terminals out there. For example shellinabox (<https://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/>) which is a full javascript implementation of a vt100 compatible terminal plus a server written in C providing pty streams over http. Web shell (<http://code.google.com/p/web- shell/>) is another one, doing all the terminal emulation on the server written in python and transferring full lines to the browser.

If you're interested to write your own terminal emulator, have look at pyte (<https://github.com/selectel/pyte>), a very clean and beautiful python library to write vtxxx compatible terminal emulators.

</comment><comment><USER19> We can already do everything from inside emacs; oh wait! Chrome's the browser. So that's completely different.

<comment><USER20> There's actually a really interesting article/email I read a long time ago saying that emacs main competitor was the browser, and that it was likely to be overtaken by it unless emacs reacted in some way.

I can't find the article with a cursory google search right now, but maybe someone else knows it can find it.

<comment><USER21> I believe that would be Yegge's rant from 2008: [http://steve- yegge.blogspot.com/2008/04/xemacs-is-dead-long-...](http://steve- yegge.blogspot.com/2008/04/xemacs-is-dead-long-live-xemacs.html)

Scroll down a bit to the heading "The bad news: the competition isn't the IDEs"

"IDEs are draining users away, but it's not the classic fat-client IDEs that are ultimately going to kill Emacs. It's the browsers. They have all the power of a fat-client platform and all the flexibility of a dynamic system. I said earlier that Firefox wants to be Emacs. It should be obvious that Emacs also wants to be Firefox. Each has what the other lacks, and together they're pretty damn close to the ultimate software package. "

<comment><USER20> Yup, that's it! Thank you. I love being able to tap into collective memory :)

It strikes me as true though, step by step we're moving functionality to the browser. In some ways it feels great, but in others it's terrifying - <USER2> thought of this (and the next) generation poorly re-implementing emacs in the browser...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I guess, the next notable iteration would be: "Google is working on integrating Emacs into Chrome". Oh well.

<comment><USER23> This announcement reminded me too of when Linus commented (upon the integration of virtual memory into Linux) that Linux had become the Emacs of terminal emulators.

Pretty funny that by integrating a Terminal emulator, Chrome becomes the Emacs of web browsers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why? This seems like the perfect thing for an NaCl application.

<comment><USER25> Sounds like the perfect thing for a JNLP app to me.

<comment><USER26> Shhh, now that embedded Java does everything we need, we must pretend it no longer exists — how else could we justify all the insane technological contortions that we'll need in order to justify profiting through sequestering users' data, renting 1980s-era features to them, and selling their attention, intimate habits, and social bonds to advertisers?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Makes sense. Using the console to query information about what's going on inside Chromium's processes is already similar to the "shell experience". (This might explain why recent Chromium builds have gone from 45MB to 235MB!!)

</comment><comment><USER28> Google or someone at Google? I cannot figure that out from that page, and I do not see a business reason for doing it. Or is this intended to be the software equivalent of JTAG on Chrome OS? What am I missing?

</comment><comment><USER29> Combining a terminal emulator with Google Sync would be really cool to have - terminal settings that sync just like any other preference or bookmark.

</comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone remember Konqueror has a webbrowser/file browser methodology of handling protocols such as SFTP through IOSlaves called FISH?

I know Konqueror shares a codebase with Chromium through the KHTML renderer and maybe more, but maybe Google's Chrome is dipping into the well of ideas that comes from the KDE project but using a different implementation, of course.

</comment><comment><USER31> Anyone still remember XMLterm that was included in the Mozilla browser in year 2000 or so :-) <http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/06/07/xmlterm/index.html>

<comment><USER32> Hah, it looks a lot like TermKit!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I am getting a weird sense of deja vu - Netscape included a 3270 emulator with the browser back in the '90s.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270>

</comment><comment><USER34> Chrome is the ChromeOS ;-) I'm wondering whats the intended use tho? Start ssh and the like from the webpage? _scared_

<comment><USER35> For those of you too young to remember, all the early web browsers supported telnet: URLs, usually launching an external telnet client.

<comment><USER36> At least Firefox still does. Actually it supports any foo:// protocol if you're willing to configure an external program to handle it :)

Edit: instructions here <http://kb.mozillazine.org/Register_protocol>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> But they can't make it so that you can view the source without loading the page -_-</comment>


The Kindle Tablet: Interesting, but Not Really - <AUTHOR> http://caffeineandclyde.tumblr.com/post/9719953285/kindle-tablet

<comment><USER2> Wait, so let me get this straight. The author goes into all this huplah in the beginning about "well these people could be right", but, towards the end he says this.... "The Kindle is going to be broken, sluggish, and unusable in the eyes of most tech-savvy users and developers, but I think it'll sell well once Amazon plasters it across their site and will introduce a lot of people to post-PC devices."

I'm sorry but as an author you are horrid. Not only were you semi on the right track at the beginning, it actually made me read the rest of your article... then you said that. That "know it all, lets be completely hypocritical" type ordeal. How do you know what it will be. You are speculating the same as everyone else.

In other words, you article not only failed, it made you look like a hypocritical author just writing random thoughts down, then doing the same exact thing you were talking about others doing.

People are saying this is a game changer from a price to offerings ordeal. Game changing is more than just what tech it has, it's about price. This could possibly force I pads to come down in price. Is that not a game changer? People are so stuck on this well it can't do this, or that ordeal, when in reality, it's more about lowering the price of things. I guess your just one of those people that has to have a million apps and do whatver on a tablet (they are already worthless for any real computing), so it's more down to reading articles, tinkering here and there, a few games, movies etc. What is there to revolutionize asides from PRICE?</comment>


Rails 3.x projects to learn from (do you know of any?) - <AUTHOR>

Can you recommend me a good Rails 3.x project ("good" would mean that its code is good) to learn from? I'm a Rails newbie and after a couple of books and tutorials, I think it's time for me to take a look at some good production-quality code. <comment><USER2> <https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq>

<https://github.com/fredwu/angel_nest>

<https://github.com/locomotivecms/engine>

<https://github.com/fatfreecrm/fat_free_crm>

<comment><AUTHOR> Great stuff! Thanks a lot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Teambox is on 3.0.9

Source - <https://github.com/teambox/teambox>

<comment><AUTHOR> Teambox looks really nice! And it certainly is a "real application". Thanks!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Trying to land a 100% remote job, how risky are contract-to-hire gigs? - wu-ikkyu I'd like to migrate to a 100% remote work lifestyle and have a potential lead: a 3 month contract to hire at $25/hr (a net loss compared to my current job) and $75-85k +  "partial benefits" (a net gain) if hired.
It's a web dev role with a stack I am very familiar with, so I'm not concerned about performing poorly.
For those HNers who are familiar with remote/contract to hire jobs, does this seem like a risk worth taking to try to break into the 100% remote work life style?
I'm concerned about leaving my current position and then not getting hired at the end of the contract for reasons outside of my control (i.e. budget constraints on the employer side).
A little background: I currently work a stable job as a senior developer with a company I've been with since I graduated from college 3 years ago. I work from home once a week.
Any advice would be much appreciated. <comment><AUTHOR> from my experience, contracts work like this:

\- some person in the organization - usually some PM or VP or some other management type - politics for getting budget. some finance person approves budget. the person who requested the budget "hires" you.

employment works like this:

\- the same person politics for headcount, reads resumes, employs some kind of interview process, gets HR involved. HR has quite an opinion on who can be hired and who can not, and they are not at all about ability.

If you move from a contract to employment, you still go through HR. HR won't even touch your contract situation. Doesn't matter to them.

That being said, if anything, you should earn MORE on a contract than on fulltime employment. Employment is cheaper than contracts.

If 85k would be your target salary, they should be paying you an easy 60/hour on a contract.

If I was you, I'd understand this as 3 months of cheap labor into "sorry bro, HR nixed the headcount, good luck".

You NEVER budge on compensation. Maybe if Elon interviewed you for neuralink and gave you 3% of the company. Because you know its going to be worth a trillion dollars some day. That'd be the only reason I'd ever leave some cash on the table.

Don't let these clowns fool you into believing that you should earn less working remotely. You should be making more, if anything. When you work remotely, they save office space and office space is expensive. If you save them office space, that should go in your pocket. It never will, but thats how you should think about it.

edit: promises are worse than worthless. youll only get exactly whats in your contract, and nothing more.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'd like to help. I've been 100% remote for 7 years. Email me (it's in my profile).

<comment> wu-ikkyu Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place, but when I click on your username I don't see an email address listed.

<comment><USER3> This is a common problem on HN. There is a specific spot for the email address that is visible to the member him/herself and many people think it is publicly visible, but it is not. If it has not been added to the freeform "about" area where you can tell the world about yourself, no, it isn't visible to anyone else.

This is likely what is going on here.

<comment><USER2> 100% correct. Thank you

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As an employer, I like contract-to-hire because it gives me a chance to learn more about the employee -- and vice versa. Most of these have worked out quite well, a few have ended in... spectacular fashion. Point is, I have always felt that contract to hire (when I don't already know the person) reduces the risk of a "bad match" on both sides.

</comment><comment><USER5> $75-85k salary means your hourly rate should be $60-70/hr unless they provide written guarantee of job after contract.

</comment><comment><USER6> For your own sake, you need to work with the employer to define the parameters which would trigger you getting hired.</comment>


Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - <AUTHOR> http://hn-books.com/Books/Zen-And-The-Art-Of-Motorcycle-Maintenance.htm <comment><USER3> Out of curiosity, how did people who had already studied philosophy find this book? Nothing in it struck me as particularly revelatory, and I'm wondering if maybe I just wasn't the intended audience.

<comment><USER4> There have been a few books like this, that are supposed to be massive and life changing, but when I read they just fell flat. Everything by Ayn Rand I read was like this too.

I could get past the pacing, the circular storytelling, and largely the premise of it just didn't work in my mind. It was not something I could get into and getting past more than a chapter at a time was painful.

Oddly, I like philosophy and I ride motorcycles too.

My only theory is that since these books have been published, the core ideas have worked their way through our culture so throughly that reading it now just seems like 'duh'. This is the way I felt reading Ayn Rand and not a single interesting thing there popped out at me as new or novel.

<comment><USER5> > My only theory is that since these books have been published, the core ideas > have worked their way through our culture so throughly that reading it now > just seems like 'duh'. This is the way I felt reading Ayn Rand and not a > single interesting thing there popped out at me as new or novel.

Either that, or the ideas are presented within the pages as interesting and novel, but they're actually simple takes on simple questions. You get all the aesthetic of intellectual challenge and none of the challenge, and then you get to congratulate yourself for understanding something so highbrow. Kind of like literary video games.

I put a lot of hacker-culture sacred cows (Vonnegut, Twain, Huxley, Orwell) in this category.

An alternate hypothesis is that being raised by two professors of literature turned me into an insufferably snobby twat.

<comment><USER6> Orwell is revered precisely because he was both simple and correct. Whoever told you that Orwell was supposed to be some sort of intellectual challenge or deep philosophy did you a great dis-service, because that's entirely missing the point. He cut through complex or pretentious intellectual bullshit like a chainsaw through butter.

Imagine your job was to explain the Bolshevik revolution to humanity. Not to intellectuals, to everyone. In the most clear, straightforward and plain way possible so that the greatest number of people could read and understand what you wrote. Now try to imagine a book better at that than Animal Farm.

<comment><USER5> I was referring more to _1984_ that _Animal Farm_. The only thing _1984_ does a chainsaw/butter number on is nuance.

<comment><USER6> _It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I'd decided, had gotten out of hand - in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as "similar to the Nazis" or "Hitler-like" was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer.

So, I set out to conduct an experiment - to build a counter-meme designed to make discussion participants see how they are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme...and perhaps to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons._

\-- Mike Godwin: <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html>

1984 may be the most successful memetic engineering project in history. He developed viral antibodies for totalitarianism and then injected them into our culture. It worked so well that people say "Orwellian" to mean "totalitarian- esque" in the same way they say "Kleenex" to mean "facial tissue".

Making ideas as simple as possible, but not simpler requires some amount of creative genius. Nuance is not viral.

EDIT, a thought experiment: Your job is to write a short book that if it could somehow be read by the population of North Korea would cause the Kim Jong-Il regime to collapse. Could such a book be written? I think 1984 would do it.

<comment><USER5> _1984 may be the most successful memetic engineering project in history._

Dressing down your prose a little, you're saying " _1984_ successfully manipulated a lot of [gullible] people".

And that is, in a nutshell, why I don't like it much. Orwell does not treat his reader as a peer. There's no _respect_ there, just manipulation, because the author doesn't trust the reader with nuance.

EDIT (in response to yours): Luckily for me, I am nobody's minister of propaganda. I would (were I a much better writer than I am) tell it like it is, nuances and all, and let them do with that what they will.

<comment><USER6> "1984 successfully manipulated a lot of [gullible] people"

1984 successfully _vaccinated_ a lot of people and helped stop certain diseases of the mind from spreading and causing more damage to civilization.

Like Jonas Salk and polio.

Although.. I saw Victoria Jackson on a Fox News clip once ranting about how Barack Obama is a socialist and she mentioned how she had read 1984 multiple times and therefore understood how the socialists work and how they are coming to get her. I wonder what will happen in her brain when someone explains to her that George Orwell was a socialist.

In other words it looks like some people are so dim that the vaccine can't work on their minds.

Tangent: I also wonder what would happen to Sarah Palin's brain if someone explained to her what a kibbutz is.

<comment><USER5> "1984 successfully _vaccinated_ a lot of people and helped stop certain diseases of the mind from spreading and causing more damage to civilization."

You're still just coming up with synonyms for "got them to do what I want."

I'll thought experiment you back. If _1984_ were largely ignored, would you still think it worth reading? You claim that this book influenced the behavior of a world ripe for totalitarian domination. That's a big claim in and of itself, but let's let it stand for the sake of the point I really want to make.

Basically, you care about _1984_ from the perspective of its effect on a bunch of people you don't respect (you think their "minds" are weak enough to need "vaccination" against a "disease"). Even you are treating it basically as a remedial text for political idiots. You don't even mention anything you got out of reading _1984_.

So, if it weren't effective at convincing people you don't respect of your viewpoint, would you care at all? Would this book be worth reading if you were the only person ever to read it?

That last is my measure of quality, and _1984_ falls short - sure, it's an important cultural phenomenon, but I could have reaped the benefits of the cultural phenomenon without ever reading the book.

<comment><USER6> No no no no. It didn't occur to me that my words might be interpreted this way:

 _people you don't respect_ \-- _you think their "minds" are weak enough to need "vaccination" against a "disease"_ \-- _remedial text for political idiots_

I respect (former) East Germans. I don't think they're idiots or have weak minds, or need remedial texts or any kind of higher education or higher intelligence. I don't think they're any different from West Germans. Same with North Koreans and South Koreans. There's no such thing as a mind which is naturally insusceptible to bad ideology. We all need inoculation.

 _Basically, you care about 1984 from the perspective of its effect_

Yes. Orwell fought with a gun in Spain as a member of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification. He was fighting with a pen when he wrote 1984. He was more successful with the pen.

 _would you still think it worth reading?_

Dunno. I never claimed it worth reading. But it's short, to the point, and concisely illustrates some important ideas. It might be worth reading just to add "memory hole" to your vocabulary. On other hand maybe Milan Kundera is a more entertaining choice. I love this Kundera quote: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Whether any given book is worth reading seems very personal to me. I don't have much of an opinion about it. I, personally, didn't love the book. But I did love the movie.

<comment><USER7> I think there's quite a distinction to be made between the people who did their best to survive under the East German system and the people who _actively participated in establishing and maintaining that system_.

Consider _1984_ as being targeted at those who would otherwise be influenced by equally-simplistic totalitarian ideologies, and who might otherwise be led to collaborate with the equivalent the Stasi in the belief that they were doing good.

There was - and is - an unfortunately large population of such people, and I can't find much fault in Orwell's intention to shrink its ranks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The schism between classicism and romanticism, as presented in "Zen", changed the way I view the world. I've been slowly teaching myself to see both, and to switch between those views at will, though it's occasionally unsettling to do so.

</comment><comment><USER9> It never ceases to amaze me how often technical people in general and computer programmers in particular read this book and can't see the point, which is that your values can't be deduced by logic.

<comment><USER10> Here are some thought provoking ideas for computer hackers that he discusses at some length: * Is it a good idea or bad idea to listen to music while working? Why? * Do machines have souls, and can they? * Why do machines frustrate me so much? What happens when I get frustrated? What role does frame-of-mind play in productivity, and how do you control it?

A lot of the negative comments I see here are perhaps expecting too much from the book. It's not like God wrote it and provided all the answers to life. (And even if that did happen, probably a lot of people would hate it.) It's just a very interesting and thought provoking book.

And with regard to the comparisons to Ayn Rand, it's nowhere near that level. The book is very short compared to what Ayn Rand writes. It's not preachy at all like her stuff. It's also far more practical. Ayn Rand writes about how civilization as a whole should live. This book is far more personal and contemplative, and not preachy at all. Ayn Rand might talk for 45 pages about how socialized medicine is a parasite on the productive people. Persig might talk for 3 pages about how if you keep working on the machine when you feel frustrated, you're just building your frustration into the machine and making it part of it. Totally different in scale and practicality.

<comment><USER11> How about a computer hacker break into Cuban internet users with the news with what happened in Egypt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very wordy review of a very good book.

My favorite take-aways from the book are that 'Good is a noun' and the concept that not all questions may actually be formed properly and thus may not deserve an answer [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)#Cultural_referenc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_\(negative\)#Cultural_references)

</comment><comment><USER13> I recommend this book to young engineers all of the time for the side messages on debugging, motivation and quality.

When I run into burnout problems I often use his simple advice to get out of slumps: usually) actively recharge with rest/sleep, when under the gun) coffee.

</comment><comment><USER14> Lila: An Inquiry into Morals is Pirsig's second book which is described as the defining work of the Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ).

I loved ZAMM, but Lila is a much better book and even more though-provoking. I've read it 4 times through, and I still don't think I could write a complete review of it.

So if you liked ZAMM, definitely pick up Lila.

<comment><USER15> I loved ZAMM, and have read it a few times (in college at age 20, then a decade later at age 30, and then once more in my mid-30s).

I tried Lila once in college and found it muddled and self-congratulatory, and gave up on it after just a few chapters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I had to read this as part of my Rhetoric class my freshman year of college. I hated just about every minute of it, very hard to absorb, more than a big long winded in places. It also didn't help that my TA for the class was convinced that the book was written about him (not really, but every other class was a discussion about how what was happening in the book was related to his life.) However, attempting to deal with, understand, classify, define "quality" is one of the few explicit activities I did for a college class that I spend any time reflecting on today.

</comment><comment><USER17> The cornerstone of originality within this book is how Pirsig introduces his philosophy of Quality. Yet, if you read ZAMM carefully, he never defines this term. Overall, a frustrating and thought-provoking read.

<comment><USER18> Well, that's sort of the point.

psedo-qq/ Quality is that which is good, but if you try to put your finger on it, it sort of squishes out and you end up with empty platitudes and tautologies. / (my apologies, it's been 10 years since I've read it, and my copy isn't here)

He goes into it in the class, teaching it but refusing to define it, and one level higher, does it with the book.

<comment><USER19> This is similar to the "quality without a name" as described by Christopher Alexander. Btw, his seminal book on patterns is totally worth reading - <USER2> GoF patterns seem bland and uninteresting in comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I failed at my first attempt to read this. I'll have to try again someday.

<comment><USER21> I'm about halfway through, and it's taken 5 months to get there. Although I got through the first section in a week or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> ZAMM and the follow-on Lila are both worthwhile reads. However, I was uncomfortable with Persig's (pervasive) discussion of insanity.

He defines insanity as, roughly, holding beliefs that differ widely from those held by an overwhelming majority of society. There seems to be an explicit avoidance of physical causes for mental illness to the point of rejecting the idea that mental illness is an "illness" to be treated. His "insanity" is a natural result of pursuing complex paths of thought to their logical end (beyond where most people take them).

Can anyone shed light about the current (medical) take on mental illness and whether it jives with what Persig has to say?

<comment><USER23> I don't think his account ever claimed to be a factual, science-based analysis of mental illness, but rather a subjective account from someone who is/was mentally ill.

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure what you mean by that. A major theme in the books is reconciling science with subjective experience, but he doesn't advocate doing so by _ignoring_ factual things. I would have a hard time believing that he intentionally treated mental illness that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I loved this book when i read it. I liked it mostly because it was able to explain to me what i already "knew" but couldn't explain. I now had the vocabulary and a road map to figure myself out. Its not so much that the ideas in the book were life changing, they were interesting to think about, but what i got out of it is that the book sparked a process in my mind to turn myself from a depressed cynical high-schooler, into a pragmatic adult, who enjoys his work, his studies, and his art, yet is not blinded by idealism or plagued by cynicism.

I guess its a lot about timing, had i read it at any other point in my life, i might have not liked it.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've read the book twice once at age of 17-ish and once at 22. I got very different things from it each time. I don't think that I learned some specific knowledge or skill from the book. Rather it provoked me to look differently on many things that surround me. What I found works best for me is to read few pages, select the most important thesis he is making (because he states a lot of things all over) and to write a short essay on the topic. However, at some point I got lazier, and the book became more narrative, so I switched to reading the book.

</comment><comment><USER6> There's a great portrait of hacker vs non-hacker mentalities which I think is on pages 15 and 16. I just went to Google Books to see if I could pull a quote from it but those 2 pages are missing.

<comment><USER15> Agreed; that's a choice bit. It was the first time I realized how sad and constrained the world-views of non-hacker types were.

...and the discussion of pistons and shims also got me interested in metalworking!

<comment><USER6> That's it. The bit about the shim is what I was specifically thinking of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> i read this entire book outloud to my girlfriend in college. we loved it.

</comment><comment><USER27> I like the big "works best on kindle" advert on the right, despite the fact that ZAMM isn't available in Kindle (or any ebook) format.

</comment><comment><USER28> Well I've ordered it.

</comment><comment><USER29> This book did not appear to have value for me when I attempted to read it.

<comment><USER5> I completely agree - I put it down in irritation after ~100 pages.</comment></comment>


Newly found TrueCrypt flaw allows full system compromise - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/article/2987438/data-protection/newly-found-truecrypt-flaw-allows-full-system-compromise.html <comment><USER2> N.B.: "September 29, 2015"</comment>


Show HN: SpreadSheet Grid – Excel-Like JavaScript DataGrid - <AUTHOR> https://rowsncolumns.app <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I wanted to share a JavaScript project that I have been working on during the quarantine period.

[https://rowsncolumns.app/](https://rowsncolumns.app/)

It's an Excel/Google Sheets-esque Grid that can be used in your React projects. Some of the features are

1\. High performance using canvas 2\. Custom Cell renderers and editors 3\. Windowing - Only visible cells are renderers 4\. Frozen columns and rows 5\. Autofilter 6\. Import/Export from excel and csv files 7\. Styling, Conditional formatting..

I have been working on DataGrids for the last 3 years professionally and I have always wanted to create a product around this.

Hope you like it. Would love to get some feedback :)

<comment><USER2> R1C1 addressing?

3\. Windowing: could this potentially be used as a frontend to a huge database of, say, millions of rows?

<comment><USER3> Yes to both. Number of rows and columns does not impact performance. Every calculation is within the viewport bounds</comment></comment></comment>


Study shows psychotherapy becoming less effective - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2015/07/cognitive-behavioral-therapy-is.html

<comment><USER2> R. P. Feynman on social sciences: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaO69CF5mbY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaO69CF5mbY)

Psychology, economics, climatology. World is literally run by "almost- sciences" claiming to have an authority of "full-science".

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like a classic case of the Decline Effect ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_effect)).</comment>